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Features
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The Spanish Enchantress
As someone who has captured the imagination of Pedro Almodovar, Tom Cruise and now, Matthew McConaughey, Penélope Cruz is most definitely a 30-year-old actress wise beyond her years.
Sunday, April 10, 2005
By Christina Radish
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Hunky paramour number two
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Before Matthew McConaughey and before Tom Cruise, the most important man in actress Penélope Cruz’s life was Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar. It was his 1997 film Live Flesh that helped her start getting English language work in films such as The Talk of Angels and The Hi-Lo Country, and it was of course All About my Mother - the 1999 Ocar winner for Best Foreign Language Film – that cemented the international drawing power of the woman born Penélope Cruz Sanchez.
So perhaps that is why the 30-year-old actress is so excited to be returning to her native Madrid this summer to work with Almodovar once more on his latest film, Volver. “Madrid is really my home, in my heart,” she reveals during a recent interview with FilmStew. “That’s my main home, even if I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles.”
“I have my house in L.A. now, and my dog, and more of a normal life, not in a hotel. But, I think that Spain will always be my main home.”
Even though Cruz is looking forward to her third collaboration with Almodovar, she considers her latest role in the big budget action film Sahara of no less importance in terms of helping her establish a reputation as a versatile actress. True to form, she insisted on undergoing extensive training for the role of Dr. Eva Rojas, a beautiful and brilliant doctor who believes that the hidden treasure that McConaughey’s character, Dirk Pitt, is seeking out, may be connected to an epidemic that threatens the world around them.
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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At the recent Grauman's premiere
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“I had to train six times a week,” declares the petite yet striking former ballet dancer. “For example, for the scene where we had to ride camels, I trained for a couple of months before we were able to do it. Everything you see, when we are next to the train, is us. We did that scene for three days.”
“We had to go 40 kilometers per hour, in a special order,” she continues. “I had to be in the middle and we had to start moving when the train was five minutes behind us. It was amazing choreography, but it was a great adventure for us.”
Looking back on the experience, Cruz says she is glad that she was unable to convince director Breck Eisner to use a stunt double. “At the beginning, I had nightmares about it,” reveals a woman sometimes referred to as the Madonna of Madrid. “I wanted to convince Breck to do it with a double, but I wouldn’t have felt good about myself. I just trained and trained for two months, until we had total control of the camels. I hope people notice that it’s us because we worked very hard for that.”
Even this is the first feature-length film project for Eisner, the son of exiting Disney head Michael Eisner, Cruz says he appeared to step into the role with ease. “From the moment that I saw Breck, I knew he was the perfect person for this movie,” she maintains. “I think that he’s a very talented director. He never looked tired, and he worked so hard.”
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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First-time director Eisner
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“He had to answer 3,000 questions a day,” she recalls. “I think he did an amazing job. I felt like that during the movie, but when I saw the results I was so happy with it.”
Meanwhile, Cruz says she saw parts of herself in the strong-willed character of a World Health Organization (WHO) doctor on the trail of a mysterious illness. “Eva is smart and she has a sense of humor,” says the daughter of a merchant father and hairdresser mother. “And, she’s also very stubborn. I consider myself stubborn to. I identify with the character that way.”
“She loses part of her team and ends up alone with these two guys that she doesn’t know, but they end up needing and helping each other,” Cruz explains. “The mystery they are trying to solve turns out to be almost the same one, even though they don’t know that at the beginning. She trusts her instincts. People tell her that she’s crazy and that her theories aren’t going to be right, but she ends up being right, anyway.”
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Christina Radish / Agency Photos
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Co-star Steve Zahn
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Cruz, named after the song “Penelope” by Joan Manuel Serrat, also loved the fact that her character rescues the hero just as many times as he rescues her. “I loved that because this kind of action adventure movie is for the whole family,” she exclaims. “And, in films I’ve read before, the female character wasn’t interesting enough. That’s why I hadn’t done a movie of this genre before.”
“But in this one, I felt that she was one more person on the team,” observes Cruz. “She had something to say. She was there for a reason. This was the first time I found the character to be interesting enough for me.”
On location in Morocco, Cruz and company had to deal with sudden sandstorms, hot days and cold, spring-like nights. But she was never one to complain. “When I get a great opportunity like this one, and I’m there for five months, I don’t think about those things,” insists the best friend of Salma Hayek. “I want to give 100% and I’m going through the adventure with everyone else.”
“It was so cold in the mornings,” she recalls with a laugh. “Everyone went there with summer clothes, so they had to call America and get warm clothes and boots. Everyone suffered through the sandstorms and the cold because it was just part of the experience.”
“I like being able to experience everything. I’m already a very adventurous person, curious about everything in life, but in this movie, I thought that I was Indiana Jones on some days.”
Beyond her life as a movie actress, Cruz sometimes finds herself traveling the globe to various personal and philanthropic reasons. She says her trip to Calcutta to volunteer at Mother Theresa’s children’s sanctuary for a week still ranks as one of her most memorable experiences.
“I felt like it was an honor to be there and work with her,” says Cruz, who donated her entire salary for the 1998 film The Hi-Lo Country to the sanctuary after her visit. “I would never say no to something like that. It was a treat that changed my life, in many ways.”
“If you go there, you don’t come back the same,” she says. “You see things that you’ve seen in the news, but when you see a baby thrown a meter away from you and you’re right there, it changes you. Every minute of your time there, you feel very useful. You ask yourself a lot of questions after that, including whether or not you should just stay there.”
“I have an adventurous spirit and want to see the world. I am curious about the world and I want answers to everything. I get very impatient, sometimes, about answers I want to have.”
| Many actors would consider requests to volunteer their time as just another result of their fame. Cruz, however, sees it as a blessing. “Right now, I’m working with different groups for different projects,” she says. “I don’t want to work with only one group.”
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“If I’m going to raise awareness about a subject, I like being there,” adds Cruz. “I spent a week in Nepal, in Katmandu, in a school of children that had escaped from Tibet, walking in the snow, and who had no feet because they got frostbite. If they ask me to be involved in a project like that, I like putting in my time and experiencing it myself.”
Through it all, Cruz has developed a very strong sense of self, one she applies in equal measure to the spiritual and professional sides of her life. “Spirituality is more the way you live,” she suggests. “You just try to do things in a way that you can respect your own integrity.”
| “Since I was 16 and I started my career in Spain, I never wanted to do the same thing twice,” says Cruz, who has acted in films in English, Spanish, French and Italian. “I always try to find material that represents a challenge, in some way, for me. I look for something that’s going to teach me something new. I’m not interested in what’s safe. The more difficult a character is, the more I enjoy it.”
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“Maybe that has been easier in Europe because I’ve been working there for 15 years, but I feel like that door is also opening here now, especially with the fact that they would make me a part of a movie like Sahara.”
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