Frenzied crowds could not get enough of handsome hunk Javier Bardem, who was in Toronto to
celebrate the North American premiere of Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved, at #TIFF2026
earlier this month.
The 57-year-old actor wowed audiences with his warm demeanor and extraordinary good looks.
“Toronto has among the best audiences in the world,’’ he quipped, while speaking about the
emotionally-charged film, a portrayal of a strained father-daughter relationship which managed
to open up the age-old abandonment wound. He joked about his good looks, receiving a
thunderous applause from the audience at Princess Wales Theatre where the film premiered!
Bardem, accompanied by Spanish actress Victoria Luengo and director Rodrigo Sorogoyen,
spoke about the film journey of working together and co-creating a film that deals with life’s
struggles of separation, estrangement and redemption.
Both Bardem and Victoria managed to add a rainbow of emotions to a film that chronicles an
unnerving collaboration between a charismatic, manipulative director and the actor’s daughter
he hasn’t seen in 13 years.
Bardem spoke about the film’s opening scene and credits Sorogoyen for bringing them together
to film the opening scene at a restaurant with a great script.Sorogoyen was born in Madrid and
studied scriptwriting at the School of Cinematography and Audiovisual of the Community of
Madrid. He has directed numerous films, including the short Mother (19), which was nominated
for an Oscar, and the features Stockholm (13), May God Save Us (16), The Realm (18), which
played the Festival, and The Beasts (22). The Beloved (26) is his latest film.
“Sorogoyen met with us in a restaurant, wrote separate biographies for Victoria as a daughter
and me as her father.. Sometimes the biographies would meet and sometimes they were
distant from each other. It was on us, as actors. to get into those 10 pages and for us to get out
of the ten pages. By the time we had some coffee, dessert and some wine, we shot ten pages in
one take,” added Bardem, full of praise for the young director and his co-actress.
Victoria, who acted in The Room Next Door shown at Tiff ’24, found the Toronto audience
extremely cool and receptive. She admitted to being scared to shoot the opening scene, which
was filmed in the restaurant with hidden cameras and the crew.
She calls Bardem a “big gift,” who gave her the opportunity to experience real life with all its rich
emotions. “My heart was thumping loudly when meeting Bardem for the very first time but after
ten minutes it was like I was speaking to my father.”
Bardem, born in 1969, recalled those times when men were educated in a way where society
permitted them to use their force over women. He says he is aware of this oppression and has
to be self-aware and expose men to these acts of oppression, “As men, we have to be aware of
the patriarchal oppression of women. This oppression transcends boundaries and I feel I had to
do something about it. I wanted to add my footprints into this work,”
The film opens in a Madrid restaurant, where Esteban (Bardem, also at this year’s Festival in
Bunker), a charismatic, world-renowned director, has lunch with Emilia (Luengo), a young actor
— and his long-estranged daughter.
Esteban offers Emilia a role in his next film, a Sahara-set historical drama about the Sahrawi
uprising against their Spanish colonizers. Esteban and Emilia have not seen each other in 13
years and their reunion is tense: when Emilia tries to remind her father of their difficult past, he
tells her she remembers it all wrong.
Nevertheless, Emilia takes the role, and soon father and daughter are on location, where,
surrounded by cast and crew, a kind of emotional showdown unfolds, one rife with cruelty,
manipulation, and the reopening of old wounds.
Victoria uses tact to portray the wounds of abandonment.”I wanted to portray abandonment with
not just anger or sadness but with love, desire and fascination as we know that this is a very
complex wound and I wanted to be truthful in how I handle this raw emotion,” she adds.
The film is a must watch for those who have experienced the loss of relationships and the
trauma it brings!
