Penélope Cruz on family, friendships and festivities
The actress talks destiny, passion and forever pushing the boundaries
Interviewing Penélope Cruz is the perfect antidote to the eternal grey of British winter for which, like me, she has a genetic aversion. “I love London! If it was sunny, it would be the best city in the world,” she declares, her voice so rhythmic, fiery and expressive it could be a dancing flamenco. “But the bad weather, especially the darkness, it’s like night-time at 4pm! That takes a toll on me. In Spain, even in winter, you get sunlight at 5pm, 6pm… Sun!” This last word is intoned like a hand clap. Cruz shot her latest film, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder On
The Orient Express, here last winter, and her best friend, Salma Hayek, is a London resident, so she is no stranger to our December festivities. “I love Winter Wonderland,” she says, pledging her allegiance to Hyde Park’s ice rink. “You’ll know where to find me at Christmas time.” I find it hard to imagine Cruz iceskating in a fat suit of wool, or relishing the dry prospect of a roast turkey. “Why not?!” she exclaims. “I like turkey.” She says this so passionately that I am somehow forced to reappraise Christmas dinner as a sensual Mediterranean affair.
This is not because Cruz, 43, is Spanish. “She has what I call loving blood,” the actor and her husband of seven years, Javier Bardem, has said. “Passion for everything.” Indeed, I’m pretty sure Cruz’s passion could melt English snow. Before we’re due to speak on the phone, she and Bardem – a notoriously private couple – are pictured at Venice Film Festival, hopping from their home-base in Madrid to the premiere of Loving Pablo (they co-star as Colombian drugs baron Pablo Escobar and his mistress, journalist Virginia Vallejo). Even at a distance, their chemistry is palpable, both projecting sexual magnetism, strength and an almost Cubist kind of beauty. Cruz, in an embroidered dress, was reminiscent of those formidable matriarchs of 1950s Italian cinema; Bardem, old-school dignity and status. They are the only Spanish actors in history to have won Academy Awards.
Cruz and Bardem first met in 1991 as the leads of erotic Spanish film Jamón Jamón, which Bardem calls “a document of our passion”. Cruz was just 17 and he 23. The film revolutionised their lives: both became such sex symbols overnight that they virtually had to go into hiding. But it was not until 2007 that they coupled, while enacting the tumultuous on-screen affair of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “I know him so well. I’ve known him for 25 years,” Cruz muses. “The first time we were in Venice [at the festival] was with Jamón
Jamón, the film that made both of our careers. So going together this time was like, ‘I can’t believe that 25 years have passed already!’”
IT IS HARD TO STUDY CRUZ’S LIFE AND NOT PINPOINT MOMENTS OF WHAT SEEM TO BE,
SERENDIPITY (if not, it is a masterclass in making it happen). At 15 she snuck into Pedro Almodóvar’s film Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which ignited her dream of acting. She subsequently became muse to the internationally lauded Spanish director: he first cast her as a pregnant prostitute in 1997’s Live Flesh, in which her baby is delivered on a bus by actress
Pilar Bardem (mother of Javier), now grandmother to her two children Leo, six, and Luna, four.
Almodóvar’s Academy Award-winning All About My
Mother brought Cruz to the attention of Hollywood in 1999, where she was cast as the exotic plaything to Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage and Matt Damon in various films. She was saved again by her Oscar-nominated performance in Almodóvar’s Volver in 2006, which led Allen to cast Cruz in his Barcelona-set film, reuniting her with Bardem. Cruz won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. When I note the strange circularity of all of this, she erupts: “I believe in destiny. I believe that you are given signs in life that guide you, if you are listening. Sometimes it seems almost like a fairy tale: all these coincidences. And I think: how can they be coincidences? I think it’s a combination of what you create and that [you are] energetically put together with certain people for a reason.”
These days, Cruz and Bardem are guided by the more practical concerns of their family: they alternate shoots, travelling to the sets of each other’s films with Leo and Luna. They spent three months last year in Colombia, filming Loving Pablo together, with Bardem moustachioed, corpulent and in a prosthetic neck playing the monstrous Escobar. During filming of Murder On
The Orient Express in London, however, Bardem morphed back into what he likes to call his (rather more cuddly) “Mrs Doubtfire” persona; looking after the children while his wife was filming. “He’s very good at that,” she says cheekily. Meanwhile, Cruz spent all day on a train with some of Britain’s most esteemed theatrical names: Branagh, who plays Hercule Poirot, Derek Jacobi and her Nine (2009) co-star Judi Dench. Cruz plays a meek, buttoned-up missionary, a far cry from the extroverted sex symbol we so often see her as.
“It was a little bit intimidating at first,” she admits, but she soon hijacked the party when she taught everyone the bluffing game Werewolves and Villagers (“I got most of them addicted”). Still, even the lure of such a distinguished cast at play was not strong enough to keep her away from her brood. “I would set up the game and I would go because I wanted to be with my kids. The next morning they would all be angry: ‘Ah, we didn’t sleep, we played for five hours and it’s all your fault!’”
Family is hallowed ground for Cruz – it always has been.
Born in Alcobendas, a workingclass suburb of Madrid, her father was a mechanic and her mother, Encarna, a hairdresser. They are still a close-knit clan: when Cruz directed an ad campaign video for Agent Provocateur in 2013, Encarna did hair, her younger brother Eduardo did music, and her pregnant younger sister Monica modelled. The young Cruz studied ballet from the age of four, something she credits for instilling her with grit and steely discipline. After seeing Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! she doggedly stormed into agent Katrina Bayonas’s office demanding she take her on, which she did on the third occasion; and she practically stalked Almodóvar for several years.
In retrospect, she says, she wasn’t ready for the sexual attention that Jamón Jamón brought her at 17. “I felt much older than I was and I realised later that I was just a kid. But I have no regrets.” She subsequently worked with some of Spain and Italy’s best arthouse directors, moving to Los Angeles in 1994, with only two lines of English: one of them was “I want to work with Johnny Depp”. She did: in Blow (2001), Pirates Of
The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) and even Murder On The Orient Express, released this month. Cruz also met her best friend, Salma Hayek, another headstrong Spanish-speaking actress (she is Mexican) battling to be taken seriously in Hollywood. They are often up for the same role. “At the beginning a couple of producers wanted us to fight. We would call each other and say, ‘Guess what! This one is offering me the same
movie that they are offering you. And they don’t know that we know.’ So we would get together and make them so embarrassed. They were so full of shit.” But instead of turning into each other’s arch nemesis, they became blood sisters. She reminisces: “One time the power went off in Salma’s house, and she called me and said, ‘I have a premiere and there is no light in my house. Come, please and help me.’ And we lit a candle and I did her hair and make-up, and I thought, ‘Wow! You really trust me.’”
Over Oscars weekend last January, Cruz – who is only on Instagram – posted a photo of herself and Salma, arm in arm, at the ceremony in 2000, as well as a video of Foreign Language film winner Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “brave” acceptance speech, sent by letter, because he boycotted the awards over Trump’s travel ban on Muslims. (Cruz and Bardem are currently shooting with Farhadi, “a genius”, on his latest film in Madrid. Cruz admits that she’s anxious about the current state of the world; she’s been a chronic worrier since childhood. “When you become a mother you worry about different things, but it’s a substitution of worries,” she says. She was profoundly saddened by the terrorist attacks in Barcelona in August. “I was in Madrid [when it happened],” she says, her voice lowering. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world when you hear something like that; it just breaks your heart. You think of those children taking a walk in the afternoon with their parents…”
She also frets about raising kids in the digital age: “It worries me when I see a group of children who are 11 or 12 together [on their phones] and they don’t talk to each other, they don’t look each other in the eyes. I worry for the future of generations of children that spend hours every day on video games or television, or they are given a phone at 11 or access to the internet and no control of the time of using it… In my house, there is no TV. There are no video games. I just want [my kids] to experience nature, to experience a rhythm that is healthier for the development of children.” She pauses and adds, “But that’s just my way of doing things.” How does she feel about the concept of children using ipads? “I think you have to be so careful with any child. Their brains are forming. They are not supposed to see material they are not ready to digest yet… [but] I don’t have anything against a few minutes of a cartoon that is age appropriate.”
Cruz is well cast in her role as the face of Lancôme Génifique but she’s also a big believer that beauty comes from within – and that means eating for her skin and her immune system. “I don’t follow any diet. I just eat really well. It’s really amazing, the power of good, healthy food.
I’ve studied so much on nutrition, I’ve become a bit of an expert on how important food is for us as a preventative medicine.”
CRUZ HAS ALWAYS BEEN AN ARDENT CHEERLEADER FOR FEMALE DIVERSITY:
she once guest-edited French Vogue, featuring ‘bigger’ models. “The way I was raised with my family, we don’t measure things that way; there is no social code that dictates that ‘this’ and ‘this’ is beautiful. I don’t have any judgement or boundaries.” It is unsurprising, then, that she feels admiration for the “strong woman” Donatella Versace, who she plays in the 1997-set next instalment of American Crime Story: The Assassination
of Gianni Versace, in a platinum blonde wig. (It will be shown on BBC Two in 2018, hot on the heels of the Golden Globe-winning American Crime Story: The
People Versus OJ.) Cruz has met Donatella over the years and, feeling the pressure, spent three months working on her Italian accent, “a very rock and roll way of speaking. A lower voice than mine. I tried to capture the essence of this woman. I can tell you
I did that [performance] with all my love and respect. It’s my own personal homage to Gianni and Donatella.” And I can almost hear that loving blood circulating through her veins. e
Murder On The Orient Express is out 3rd November. Penélope Cruz is the face of Lancôme Génefique
In my HOUSE, there is no TV. There are no video GAMES. I just want my kids to experience NATURE