It’s hot and sunny, and there’s a pool party on the seventh floor of the blandest apartment complex in Atlanta.

In the elevator, flaxen-haired women holding floaties and red Solo cups file in, chattering with such single-minded purpose that no one realized one of cinema’s most crackling actors had been backed into a corner. It’s not a position in which the men that Javier Bardem is best known for playing tend to find themselves. But on this weekend morning, dressed in athletic shorts, a pink performance tee and laceless sneakers, Mr. Bardem flashed a broad smile and was gamely smooshed.

When his voice — melodic, rounded as a single malt, vowels elongated to their breaking point — finally filled the elevator car, musing on traffic conditions, it sounded like a sonnet. The flaxen heads registered the man in their midst, snapped to attention, and swiveled.

Mr. Bardem does not drive — ironic, given that he was here to discuss his role in “F1: The Movie,” a blockbuster about Formula One ambitious enough that it embedded its film shoot into an actual professional racing season and whisked Mr. Bardem and his castmates, Brad Pitt, Damson Idris and Kerry Condon, from the Silverstone Circuit in Britain to Budapest to Las Vegas to Abu Dhabi.

In the film, Mr. Pitt and Mr. Idris play drivers on a wheezing racing team that has hobbled through two seasons without a single point. Mr. Bardem rallies them as a driver-turned-owner named Ruben Cervantes, who is in deep debt and has placed his last big, perhaps misguided, bet on an old friend and a promising, but green, rookie.