For Cruz, motherhood helped shape her role as a cancer patient in ‘Ma Ma’
In more ways than one, Ma Ma is Penélope Cruz’s most personal film to date.
In the Spanish-language drama (now showing in New York; opens Friday in Los Angeles and Miami), the Oscar-winning actress endures a world of pain as Magda, a recently separated and newly unemployed mother who is diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer. Through painful rounds of chemotherapy and a mastectomy, Magda draws hope from a new relationship (Luis Tosar), pregnancy and, most vitally, her young son (Teo Planell).
Cruz, 42, says she would have approached the role differently before she had children (Leo, 5, and Luna, 2, with husband Javier Bardem).
“I don’t mean you have to go through every experience to understand a character, but I understand the way that she looks at this kid,” Cruz says over a breakfast of eggs and bacon at a Midtown hotel. “She has this monster that is threatening to take her away from what she loves most. It’s heartbreaking.” But Cruz’s connection to Ma
Ma goes beyond maternal instincts: It’s also her most handson effort as a producer. Spanish filmmaker Julio Medem had written the script years before but hadn’t shown it to anybody before Cruz. Fascinated by its unflinching protagonist and provocative storytelling, she collaborated with him on various drafts — providing notes and meeting with doctors, cancer patients and survivors to ensure authenticity.
One moment she particularly wanted to capture is when Magda is diagnosed and insists upon going to the salon and to her son’s soccer game before starting treatment.
“Normally in movies, it’s a very dramatic scene where there’s a nod of acceptance and the character goes down into a black hole,” Cruz says. “The way (Medem) wrote it, I really liked, because I’ve seen reactions like that (in real life). ‘What do you mean I have cancer? Sorry, I have a hair appointment — should I keep it, or do I cancel?’ She’s talking about something so trivial, but that reaction tells a lot about how, in that moment, you just want to run away from that present time as fast as you can.”
Ma Ma is Cruz’s second film about breast cancer (after 2008’s
Elegy, in which she played a graduate student who embarks on a relationship with her professor), although she appears even more haggard here: naked, scarred and bald (thanks to a combination of caps and visual effects). “I didn’t think for a second, ‘ What if you look good or bad?’ ” she says. “I love Magda, she represents these women. It’s my homage.”
Cruz just wrapped filming comedic drama The Queen of Spain with Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin. Later this year, she’ll unveil a short documentary that she directed, 1 in 100,000, about childhood leukemia. Although she says she isn’t “brave enough to jump in” on directing a feature-length movie for at least five or 10 years, she plans to direct her third short film next year.
Directing, she says, is something “I’ve been wanting to do since I was a teenager, it never left me.” As for producing, “I will do more, but I don’t want to develop three, four projects at the same time. I’m working as an actor, but I’m also raising two little kids — that’s why I don’t work all the time. I try to really have a balance.”