Amazon Orders Cortes Miniseries Starring Javier Bardem

Amazon Studios has ordered Cortes, a miniseries based on the exploits of the titular conquistador, with Javier Bardem in the lead role. Oscar-winning writer Steven Zaillian will pen the script, based on a 50-year-old screenplay by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo’s own saga was recently depicted in a feature film starring Bryan Cranston in an Oscar-nominated performance.


Calling the saga of Hernan Cortes (1485-1547) epic doesn’t begin to do the story justice. The 18-year-old future conquistador first arrived in the New World in 1504, following in the wake of Christopher Columbus. In 1519 Cortes embarked upon the expedition into the interior of Mexico for which he would later become infamous. Cortes would lead an army, partially made up of natives, into the kingdom of the Aztecs, ruled over by the famed Montezuma. What followed was a great conquest, or an act of genocide depending on your point of view. Either way, the Aztec empire disappeared from the face of the Earth, and Cortes achieved immortality.


Amazon Studios will now tell the story of the conquistador and his exploits in Cortes, starring Oscar-winner Javier Bardem (via Deadline). Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment will produce the four-hour miniseries, with Amblin TV’s Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey executive producing together with Bardem. Spielberg was himself at one time interested in tackling the project as a feature film before it was reworked in miniseries form. This project is different from a previous Cortes series announced at HBO, with Martin Scorsese at one time set to direct the pilot. That project appears to have stalled out however.


Bardem spoke about getting to work with Steven Spielberg and Amazon on the story of Cortes:

“It is a privilege to tell this epic story— one that is full of drama and conflict within this huge, historical spectacle where two distant civilizations clash at the height of their reign. The best and worst of human nature came to life in all its light and darkness. As an actor, there is no better challenge than to serve such a unique project that I have been passionate about for years, and I am thrilled to be working with this dream team of Steven Spielberg, Steven Zaillian and Amazon.”

Bardem knows a thing or two about depicting the worst of human nature, having won an Oscar for playing the murderous Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men. Bardem was last seen playing an egotistical artist/God metaphor in Darren Aronofsky’s controversial horror film mother! He also starred in last year’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as the villainous Captain Salazar.


Needless to say, Bardem is no stranger to playing cold-blooded characters who suffer from somewhat grandiose delusions. But playing Cortes takes all that to another level.


Amazon’s Cortes itself takes on an extra layer of intrigue thanks to the name Dalton Trumbo. Once one of Hollywood’s top screenwriters, the author became blacklisted in the ’50s for refusing to name names before the Communist-hunting HUAC. Trumbo would pen scripts anonymously for years before finally receiving a screen credit again on Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. Trumbo’s Cortes script has received a reworking from Zaillian, himself an Oscar-winner for adapting Schindler’s List.