Javier Bardem opened the international press conference for "Bunker" in Toronto by introducing himself as Penélope Cruz "after a very bad night." Cruz, his wife and co-star, wasn't in the room. The night before, she had accepted the TIFF Special Tribute Award.
The joke landed, and then Bardem and writer-director Florian Zeller spent the next half hour making the case that their film isn't really about a doomsday shelter. It's about the one most of us are already living in.
In "Bunker," Bardem plays Miguel, a successful London architect offered a prestigious commission to build a survivalist bunker for a tech billionaire, played by Paul Dano. Cruz plays his wife, Sophia, who watches the job pull him further from her, from their teenage daughter and from the man he used to be. Stephen Graham and Patrick Schwarzenegger co-star. Sony Pictures Classics opens the film Dec. 11 in New York and Los Angeles before it expands nationwide Jan. 15, 2027.
The bunker you carry in your pocket
Zeller, the Oscar-winning playwright behind "The Father" and "The Son," said the survivalist bunker was only the starting point.
"The more I was thinking about it, the more I realized that to some degrees we all are tempted to live in a bunker," Zeller said. "Not a real bunker, but like an invisible bunker."
He described a lifestyle sold by the same billionaires who build the real ones: food, cinema, love and news delivered to the door, so that no one has to go out into the world. "Friends now it's called followers," he said, warning that we are living "as if we were isolated islands and not interconnected continents."
Zeller tied the idea directly to who holds power right now. "We are in a moment where so few people own almost everything," he said. "They own our privacy somehow, our email addresses. They own the platforms on which we communicate. They own the newspaper."
Bardem put it more bluntly. The men who promised to connect us through our devices, he said, are the first to cut themselves off. "We're going to give you what you need constantly with a click and we're going to call it connection, but it's the opposite," he said.
No phones at the Bardem-Cruz house
That theme followed Bardem home. Asked what raising two teenagers has taught him, he said the hardest part is letting children become themselves rather than reflections of their parents. Then he described the house rules.
"Our daughter doesn't have a cellphone. Our son had his first cellphone six months ago. No media, no social media yet," Bardem said. "It's scary that you don't allow your 13-year-old walk alone on the streets at night, but you allow a 13-year-old girl to go through the rabbit hole of the media where she can have access to everything."
He admitted the rule only goes so far, because their friends are online. And he admitted his own limits. In the digital language his kids speak, he said, "I can barely send an email."
Zeller pointed to the scene in "Bunker" that answers the problem. Miguel asks his daughter what she is always doing on her phone. She is listening to music, and she offers to share it. "He's coming into her bunker, learning her own language," Zeller said. "It's also us that has to learn how to come into their bunker to be with them."
Playing married when you're married
Zeller wrote the script for Bardem and Cruz. Bardem said the couple, who have worked together more than five times since "Jamón Jamón," were careful about what they would and wouldn't bring to the screen.
"We are giving our experience as a married couple to make the audience feel that sensation that they belong to a life together," he said. "But at the same time, their conflicts are not our conflicts." He credited Zeller as the referee: "It's not psychotherapy. It's not couple therapy. It's a movie about two different people."
The upside, he said, is that they don't need rehearsal, "so he saved a lot of money."
Zeller said watching them work in silence was the reward. "I could tell exactly what they were going through, all the thoughts that the characters was going through with almost nothing, just the look, just the face," he said. "To me, it's gold."
Penélope, Ithaca and a painter from Barcelona
Zeller said Homer's "The Odyssey" sat under the script, partly because of Cruz's name. In Homer, Penelope is the woman Odysseus comes home to. In "Bunker," Zeller said, Odysseus never leaves the bed. "He's still in the same bed, but somehow he's far away from himself," he said. Ithaca is the marriage they used to have.
The film also hides a private reunion. The paintings in the movie's gallery were made by Agustí Puig, the Barcelona painter who taught Bardem and Cruz to paint for Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," the film on which their relationship began. Zeller said Bardem recognized the work on set and told him what a strange coincidence it was.
'She's 16 years old still'
With Cruz absent, Bardem was asked what he feels watching her year, which includes "The Invite," "La Bola Negra" and "Bunker."
"I couldn't be more proud of her," he said. He remembered meeting her on their first film, when she was a teenager and he was in his early 20s, and said he saw the same thing in her tribute reel the night before. "She's 16 years old still and she has that fire and that innocence that makes her go and go far with her intuition," he said, "and that's beautiful, having in mind that she's been working for 30 something years."
Bardem's stage debut, now running in Madrid
Bardem also talked about the project he was nervous about: his professional stage debut in "¡Chéjov, Chéjov!," a set of short Anton Chekhov works directed by his longtime acting teacher, Juan Carlos Corazza. It opened Nov. 5 at Espacio Zafra Teatro in Madrid and runs Thursdays through Sundays until Jan. 31, 2027.
"Yes, I'm nervous. Yes, I'm insecure, but that's not new," Bardem said. He described a room of about 110 to 120 seats and a cast he has known since he was 20. "I want to share with the audience, with a small audience in an intimate way, my process as an actor, knowing that I may fail," he said. "It's not going to be a failure."
It's the same lesson he drew from "Bunker": open the door, let people in and accept what it costs.
"Bunker" opens in limited release Dec. 11 and nationwide Jan. 15, 2027, from Sony Pictures Classics.
Quick answers
When does "Bunker" come out? Sony Pictures Classics opens "Bunker" in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 11, 2026, and nationwide Jan. 15, 2027.
Who is in the cast of "Bunker"? Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz star, with Paul Dano as the tech billionaire, Stephen Graham and Patrick Schwarzenegger. Florian Zeller wrote and directed.
Is "Bunker" based on another movie? Zeller said it grew partly from "The Man Next Door," the 2010 Argentine film by Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, who are executive producers on "Bunker."
