Do we like Javier Bardem?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decades of speaking up for oceans, refugees and Palestinians, marked down for a recent reshare of posts blaming Israel for a migrant crisis, and for his Woody Allen stance.
Bardem is the Spanish actor who won the 2008 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for playing the hitman Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. He's since been a fixture on big screens and, this year, on Apple TV in the Cape Fear remake. In June he got his handprints in the forecourt of the TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, which is a proper career-peak moment.
The story everyone's arguing about is Gaza. Since 2014, when he signed a letter critical of Israel and rejected accusations of anti-Semitism, he has only got louder. He signed the 2025 Cannes letter accusing Israel of genocide, wore a keffiyeh to the Emmys, and at the March 2026 Oscars wore a Handala pin and said "No to war and free Palestine". He told Variety some projects and brand deals reportedly fell through, but said he couldn't confirm a blacklist.
Worth knowing: in 2024 he condemned the Hamas attacks, called for the hostages' release and a ceasefire, and wanted both Netanyahu and the Hamas leaders judged by the International Criminal Court. That's a long way from the caricature his harshest critics paint. After the Oscars, an unnamed viewer lodged an FCC complaint calling his message hateful toward Jews and Israel; the article reports no FCC action.
Here's the stain. In early August 2026 he reshared Instagram posts saying nobody knows who engineered the Ceuta migrant crisis but Israel benefits from a weakened Spain. Huckabee publicly rejected the claim, and Israeli and Jewish outlets called it a conspiracy theory. No reply from Bardem turned up in what we read, so that's a sloppy reshare rather than a pattern, but it's the sort of grievance-spiral move this page watches for.
Elsewhere, he said in a July interview that his objection was to President Milei's backing of Netanyahu, not to Argentina or Argentines. Over the years he has also stood up for the Sahrawi people, and he dived to the Antarctic seabed with Greenpeace in 2018 to push for an ocean sanctuary. No anti-LGBTQ+ words or acts turned up in what we found.
On the good-person side, one old stain: in 2005 a woman sued him over a nightclub incident, and his lawyers denied responsibility; the report doesn't say how it ended. In 2018 and 2021 he defended Woody Allen, saying that pointing fingers is dangerous if the allegations haven't been legally proven. Allen denies the accusations, and plenty of Bardem's own co-stars have disagreed with him, so that's a contested call, not a crime.