Javier Bardem or Benicio Del Toro

damn this is a tough one !

Went with Del Toro cause I've seen much more of his work & find him to be a bit more entertaining to watch . (Sicario 1 &2, Fear & Loathing, Traffic, Savages , The Usual Suspects, Che, Way of the Gun, etc etc)

Javier Bardem at his absolute peak is almost unparalleled. Biutiful, The Sea Inside, No Country for Old Men, Skyfall . . . any actor would be chuffed to have those performances in his canon. Benicio is excellent and has a surprising amount of range and versatility, and he's not going through the slump Javier is at the moment, but I still think if we're judging them on a pound-for-pound basis, Bardem wins out.

Honestly, it's sorta close for me, but I'd probably go Del Toro (and not just because he was wise enough to recently cite Denzel Washington as his main inspiration for how he navigates his career as an actor). Careers tend level out. Del Toro was around first, doing some incredible and inspired work (The Usual Suspects, Traffic, Snatch, 21 Grams). Del Toro was a "character actors character actor". A John Cazale with more rugged machismo in his arsenal.

Bardem became more recognised to non-Spanish audiences after Del Toro, and managed to maintain an air of "prestige" for a good decade that Del Toro didn't quite, because Del Toro took more risks and just went where the work was as a character actor. Del Toro mixed indie oscarbait (21 Grams) with studio junk (The Wolfman) and well meaning pulp (Sin City). From Before Night Falls till Skyfall, Bardem was basically all oscarbait, all the time, whether in Spanish or in English, and on a superficial level made him seem a more prestigious actor than Del Toro.

But here's where the levelling up comes in. Since Skyfall, Bardem has essentially started approaching his career like Del Toro. And he's struggling to do it anywhere near as well as Benicio. Instead of hunting prestige all the time, Bardem is now doing studio junk (Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) and well meaning pulp (The Gunman, The Counsellor, Mother!) as well as attempted prestige fare (The Last Face), and it's led to the worst stretch of his career.

Bardem has found his level. Talented actor with some great film performances under his belt, but not as great/infallible as he was once hyped up to. He had the right movies, directors and roles to deliver strong work in for a period, but is it not very likely that Del Toro could have delivered just as well (if not better) in The Sea Inside, No Country For Old Men and so forth? My feeling is yes.

So on countback, the Puerto Rican gets it.

It doesn't really matter what another actor could do with a role. What matters is what the actor that got the part did. Playing the "what-if" game gets rather tiresome. Sure, Del Toro probably could've done wonders with it, but Bardem actually did, and it's such a departure from what he had done up to that point, and you could argue that sort of performance is what later films he did tried (and failed) to capture.

Del Toro may have a broader range of strong works to his name (and I'm gonna have to trot out the dreaded c-word when it comes to him: consistency), but I think Bardem, when he's on, blows the very best of Benicio out of the water. And that is no mean feat.

My point was that you were overrating Skyfall as a performance in general. It's diverting camp that livened up the solemnity of Craig's 007 flick, and managed to nudge itself into an award season, but Del Toro has several performances on a higher plane that didn't even get near an awards season berth.

It's simply not a performance that I'd argue that puts Bardem in a another class to Del Toro. It doesn't, imho. The other stuff gives more weight to your argument in favor of Bardem, just not Skyfall.

Nowhere in this thread has anyone mentioned Bardem in Mondays in The Sun, Second Skin, Numbered Days - 3 of his very best and daring too - or his comeback just this year (a few months ago!) in Everybody Knows.......... I mean those are major performances and I guess people haven't seen them - I haven't seen Everybody Knows myself but shaky reviews for the film aside (and I bet they get better after it plays Toronto) no one hasn't praised him at all there.

It's kind of like a glaring omission that no one lists those or talks about him like he's in bad shape and his career has gone off a cliff.........not really true.......and I'm leaving out Live Flesh and a few others too.

His resume runs awfully deep and it's being reduced to just a piece of his work here.......

I haven't seen those two...!

Also gonna add Extasis - Bardem only 26 y/o when it filmed already has a tense presence, adds mischievous nuance, and a deeper affecting quality too. 

He's the most memorable villain of the Craig era for sure, but I actually think Alec Trevelyan from GoldenEye is a better version of that character.

 100% agreed on this.

Goldeneye is one of the best Bond films (and I'm generally not a big fan of the Brosnan era), and Sean Bean's Alec Trevelyan was so good I remember wishing he'd survived to have his own spin-off adventures as 006. Or even had a prequel before he'd gone fully rogue. The Bond franchise has never been smart about identifying potential characters like Trevelyan that could actually carry their own films.

And Trevelyan was a better villain, and better acted than Bardem's Silva. Shame the Brosnan Bond films (and their villains) went progressively downhill from the first installment.