Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz are careful to leave characters at work

Javier Bardem is adamant that he and wife Penelope Cruz are “pretty good” at leaving their movie characters on set.

The Hollywood couple has been married since 2010 and is parents to two children, seven-year-old Leo and Luna, five. As well as sharing a home life, Javier and Penelope has worked together on numerous films, including Vicky Cristina Barcelona – for which Penelope won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2008 – and 2017’s Loving Pablo, where they played drug lord Pablo Escobar and his lover, journalist Virginia Vallejo. And as much as they enjoy working together, Javier says it’s important to disengage from such intense roles.

“It’s great having Penelope there because we bring the kids with us too,” he explained in an interview with Britain’s Total Film magazine. “It’s hard when you have to work apart from each other on the other side of the world. But you have to be careful not to bring any of the character home. I think we’re pretty good at that though. We’ve been doing it for a long time!”

The husband-and-wife Oscar winners latest project is Everybody Knows (Todos lo saben in Spanish), a Spanish-language psychological thriller which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival. However, Javier admitted that he has less fond memories of one of their earlier projects – Jamon Jamon in 1992.

“I was 21 and it was my first big movie. Penelope was only 16 at the time, and her character had this nightmare that I was hanging from a goalpost, naked, like a leg of ham,” the 49-year-old recalled. “So I was strung up naked in the middle of nowhere…in December.

“I was cold, I was humiliated and I felt like, ‘S**t, what the f**k do I want to be an actor for?!”