Bardem was born on March 1, 1969 in Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain, the son of Carlos Encinas and the actress Pilar Bardem. He comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and his older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are actors. His film debut was at the age of six and a half in the film El Pícaro (The Scoundrel) and he appeared in several television series before turning to painting and, eventually, sports. Before acting professionally, Bardem was a member of the underage Spanish national rugby team.

Bardem starred in his second major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 20. In 1992, he made his first international hit with Jamón, jamón, which also starred Penélope Cruz. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native country, he would eventually land his international breakthrough performance role in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the first time for a Spaniard. This also marked Bardem's first English language speaking role. In 2002 he starred in John Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs.

Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004's Mar Adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro , who unsuccessfully brought his case to the Spanish courts, yet eventually succeeded in persuading several friends to assist him and committed suicide. That year he also made a brief appearance as a vicious crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses, in Michael Mann's crime drama Collateral, which also starred Jamie Foxx In 2007 Bardem acted in two film adaptations; the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, based upon the novel of the same name and the adaptation of the classic Colombian novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he plays chilling sociopath killer Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spanish actor to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won a Golden Globe Award and Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Award for Best Supporting Actor, and also won the Critics' Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor as well as the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Award for Best Supporting Actor. Bardem's rendition of Chigurh's trademark phrase, "Call it, friendo" was named Top HollyWORDIE of 2007 in the annual survey by the Global Language Monitor that tracks the words from Hollywood that most influenced the English Language. Anton Chigurh was placed in EW's 50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History in a recent issue at #26.

He will star in Woody Allen's film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Bardem is currently in talks to play fictional filmmaker Guido Contini in the film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Nine. The part of Guido Contini had previously been played by Raúl Juliá in the original 1982 production and more recently by Antonio Banderasin the Tony Award-winning 2003 revival also starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Jane Krakowski, Chita Rivera, and Laura Benanti.