Her deep embrace of her alter egos takes time to let go: “It has happened that I have to take a moment and say, ‘This character has to get out’. Sometimes the time when you are preparing the character makes you happier than actually playing her, or seeing the result,” Cruz adds. “No two people are the same, so it’s a bottomless pit of searching and learning, and that’s what I love the most. But I don’t want to lose those nerves, because this job can’t be done otherwise,” she says. And sometimes the first few days are a bit nerve-wracking. “I start every shoot like it’s my first film. The success hasn’t calmed her nerves one bit. Shooting in Spanish, English and Italian, she is the only performer with at least one award in Spain (Goya), Italy (David), the UK (Bafta) and France (Césars). “She may be the best-known Spaniard outside her country, apart from Real Madrid and Barcelona soccer players and, perhaps, Rafael Nadal,” wrote Esquire magazine a few years ago. The daughter of working-class parents, Encarna and Eduardo, from the Madrid suburb of Alcobendas, she broke Hollywood long ago and is now one of Spain’s most recognizable figures worldwide. Pedro is demanding, but he explains what he wants so well Penélope CruzĬruz has said she is ever grateful for the “luck” she had to star in two films, Jamón, Jamón and Belle Époque, in the same year, 1992.
It’s not that I live out acting as therapy, but it’s a kind of relief,” Cruz added. But I think that’s one of the reasons why I unconsciously chose this job. Sometimes too much, and I wish I could put a little more distance between things. “I am really affected by other people’s energy, so if a person enters a room and is not doing well and I know them, it sticks to me. Maybe I feel the good things more, but the bad things are very, very close to the surface,” she says. The film is heartfelt, even more so for a performer who considers herself “intense.” “It’s a way of life that one does not choose. How can you deny someone something like that?” she says, in reference to Spain’s many Civil War-era grave sites that remain untouched to this day. As my character says, it’s about giving the relatives the chance of a dignified burial. “I think it’s important for this subject to travel around the world. She throws herself into raising her baby, while also fighting for her grandfather to be exhumed from the mass grave where he was buried in 1936. Janis is a resilient and imperfect woman – in other words, a human being. It’s a non-stop rollercoaster, putting on the ropes,” Cruz explains of Janis, her role in Parallel Mothers. “There is no rest on a mental, emotional, even physical level. “Of all my roles with Pedro, it may be the most complicated,” she says of the film. She became the first Spanish actress to win the festival’s Volpi Cup for best actress, adding this to her Oscar won for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Many of them have been with Pedro,” Cruz, 47, tells EL PAÍS at the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere. In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to take on several complex roles. “Actors look for challenging material, characters that are different from us and from what we’ve done before. Penélope Cruz kisses the Copa Volpi on September 11 in Venice. The resulting film opens on October 8 in the United States and Spain. Almodóvar then asked her to give birth again for Parallel Mothers, only now Cruz takes up most of the screen time. The electricity produced with him behind the camera and her in front crackled through All About My Mother (1999), Volver (2006), and Pain and Glory (2019). Then promising talents, they both became stars. She was too young to appear in Kika (1993), he believed, but cast her for a few minutes in Live Flesh (1997), fitting in a birth scene that would become famous. That conversation would become the first of thousands, blossoming into a friendship and a close collaboration that is still ongoing, 30 years later. Could she please take the phone? To the teenager it seemed impossible: the director of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, the film that made her want to act in the first place, was asking after her? When Almodóvar congratulated her on some of her early roles, she had no choice but to concede - it was him.
But her family insisted: Pedro Almodóvar really was waiting on the other end of the line.
“I said, ‘Yeah, sure, come on’,” she recalls. One day many years ago, Penélope Cruz received the call she had always dreamed of, but refused to answer the phone.