While Javier Bardem was able to flex his considerable comedic chops as Fremen leader Stilgar in Dune: Part Two, his latest role is a return to bad guy basics. Bardem is set to play vile rapist/murderer Max Cady in Cape Fear, the upcoming Apple TV+ series from The Act showrunner Nick Antosca.
While Cape Fear is technically an adaptation of John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel The Executioners, Antosca is far from the first filmmaker to take on the property. Director J. Lee Thompson was the first to adopt the Cape Fear name in his 1962 film for Universal Pictures, which starred Robert Mitchum in the Max Cady role, along with Gregory Peck, Lori Martin, and Polly Bergen. Martin Scorsese took his own stab at the property in 1991, with Steven Spielberg producing. That version starred Robert De Niro as Max, with Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange, and Juliette Lewis rounding out the cast.
Both Scorsese and Spielberg are attached as executive producers for the Apple TV+ series. Per Variety, the official logline reads: “A storm is coming for happily married attorneys Amanda and Steve Bowden when Max Cady (Bardem), a notorious killer from their past, gets out of prison.” The roles of Amanda, Steve, and their daughter (named Peggy, Sam, and Nancy and Leigh, Sam, and Danny in the 1962 and 1991 versions, respectively) have not been cast as of this writing.
Bardem—who is perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning turn in No Country For Old Men—boarded a different type of crime drama this year with Ryan Murphy’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. He and Chloë Sevigny played José and Kitty Menendez, the murdered parents of Lyle and Erik. “I have to play José in a way that is ambivalent,” Bardem told IndieWire earlier this month. “We know for certain that he did certain things, and we don’t know about others. That’s a good fun place to be as an actor, to not be able to go one side or the other, but to be in the middle.” We’ll see what lessons the actor carried with him into his next sinister role whenever Cape Fear hits our screens.
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