Javier, the next hunky big thing

The well-sprung Latin lover must look as if he can fight off a bull with a handkerchief, ride a rolling-eyed horse, shoot violent banditos and seduce any chica with a smouldering glance.

If he can do these things, Hollywood will love him. They will give him contracts. Huge-breasted bimbos will throw themselves at him. Everyone will say he is the next Antonio Banderas, the next Benicio Del Toro, the next brooding big thing.

Javier Bardem doesn't want that. "I 'ate glamour," he says, pronouncing it gla-morrrr. "It is like acting after acting. I 'ate the importance that actors are given. They are the heroes of the 21st century and it is absurd. Young actors don't want to be actors any more. They just want to be famous."

He has melting brown eyes, an expressive mouth and a nose that was broken when somebody punched him in a bar in Madrid. He has the requisite attributes - that Spanish femme-macho thing that causes a woman's head to become so dizzy that her spectacles may well jump off her face and fly across the room.

Bardem, 32, first came to worldwide attention in Jamon, Jamon, a role that centred, lest we forget, on the generosity of his endowment in the underwear department, and I don't mean that the character owned lots of pairs of pants. Jamon, Jamon was about machismo, the importance of size, and demanded that he spent quite a lot of time on top of Penelope Cruz.

"A long time ago, I was like every young guy in Spain, where you have to prove how macho you are, how many girls you go with or how big your penis is. But I hated that part of myself and I wanted to do the movie to make fun of it."

Since then he has been in a wheelchair for Live Flesh, in a wig for Perdita Durango and in prison for Before Night Falls. This last, in which he portrayed the exiled Cuban novelist Reinaldo Arenas, earned him an Oscar nomination. His performance as the homosexual writer was so convincing that Gary Oldman rang the director, Julian Schnabel, and asked him if the actor actually was gay. Bardem took this as a compliment.

He is not gay, though, but like a lot of men, he did ask himself some questions when he was young. "When we are 18 or so we are forced to push our behaviour in order to be the leader of the group," he says. "But you have doubts. It happened to me but I quickly realised what I preferred." He was raised in Madrid, where his mother, Pilar, an actress, divorced his father, Carlos, a businessman, when Bardem was six. His brother and sister are also actors, but he thought he might be a painter and worked as an extra to pay for classes. He stripped as well, in a bar for a month or so. Once he even jumped out of a cake, naked, which must have been a pleasing sight, but acting took over. Pedro Almod - var gave him a part in High Heels in l991, and that was that.

IWAS a little scared when this Oscar thing happened," he says. "How it would affect people around me. That they would look at me with different eyes, and, at first, that did happen. But I said, 'If you think an Oscar makes a person more important, that is your problem.'"

The prize for Best Actor went to Russell Crowe for Gladiator. Bardem was not particularly disappointed. "You have a gold statue in your hands and industry people think, 'Oh, he's a star. He gets lots of money. We won't call him any more.' I'm not a star and I want to work. How many cases have there been of people who won an Oscar and didn't work afterwards?" He employs an agent in Hollywood but plans to stay in Madrid. He lives with his girlfriend, Cristina Pales, a translator whom he met on the set of Jamon, Jamon 10 years ago. She hated him on sight because he was immersed in the character of Raul, a swaggering gigolo.