Penelope Cruz’s Oscar is now resting comfortably in her house in Madrid.
But, after she first won the Academy Award for best supporting actress a year ago, Cruz would not let the golden statuette out of her sight.
“It travelled a lot with me because I didn’t want to leave it anywhere,” Cruz tells Sun Media. “So, in the first month, it even travelled to the beach one day. All my friends wanted to see it and take a picture with it. And now I’m giving it a rest, a bit.”
Cruz, Spain’s most internationally famous actress, won her Oscar for playing a fiery Spaniard in Woody Allen’s continental comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. It was a role she played, with exuberance, in English and Spanish.
This was not her first dalliance with Oscar and it may not be her last. Cruz was nominated as best actress for her stunning performance in Pedro Almodovar’s masterpiece, Volver.
Now she is back in Almodovar’s Broken Embraces, playing a woman with a triple life.
Almodovar helped to propel Cruz’s career by featuring her in his own breakout film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Broken Embraces is their fourth collaboration and the two have become dear friends. Cruz is his muse.
The openly gay Almodovar even joked once to QMI Agency that Cruz is the only woman who has ever inspired him to think about going straight.
Cruz blushed at his comments.
“I think it changes, like everything,” Cruz says now of her maturing (and platonic) relationship with Almodovar. “It is growing and transforming and evolving and it has gotten to a point where we almost know what the other one is thinking.
“We really have a strong friendship. But that doesn’t mean I get less nervous when I’m around him on the set. Or less intimidated. Because he is so honest. If you do a rehearsal or a scene and it’s good, he will tell you. If it’s bad, he will tell you, too, with every detail! That’s why it’s so addictive working with him — the honesty! — and it’s so refreshing.”
Nervous? Intimidated? Absolutely! It is a recurring theme for Cruz. The night she won the Oscar, she admitted the honour would not make her swagger with confidence. Facing the rehearsals for Rob Marshall’s musical Nine — Cruz’s big Hollywood release this holiday season — she admitted she was scared witless because she did not feel comfortable singing and dancing and outing her inner sensual being for the fetish-like role.
But Cruz also loves challenges. Doing voice work for one of the talking guinea pigs in the kiddie movie G-Force was a challenge. Nine was a challenge. Broken Embraces was a challenge, too, especially because her role included scenes as a bad actress in a film-within-the-film.
“We thought we were going to have a lot of fun doing that. ‘Ha, ha, we can do whatever we want!’ But Pedro wanted something so subtle.”
Being bad might simply involve acting “two degrees lower or higher,” Cruz says.
“If it’s just a little bit off, you don’t feel the connection and it’s hard to explain what it is.”
This is, Cruz says, every actor’s dilemma in every role. Even for an Oscar winner.
bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca
