The Phone Call That Changed Penélope Cruz’s Life

Penélope Cruz’s life changed forever when she was 18 years old. She’d gotten the acting bug as a teenager partly because of seeing Pedro Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, and began building a career for herself onscreen. But it was at 18 that Almodóvar himself called, a moment Cruz now calls “completely life-changing”—and the beginning of what the movies would call a beautiful friendship. 

Decades later, Cruz and Almodóvar have reunited once again for Parallel Mothers, in which Cruz plays photographer Janis, who becomes unexpectedly pregnant after an affair with one of her subjects. In the hospital she meets young, terrified mother-to-be Ana (Milena Smit), and the two strike up a friendship that only becomes more complicated as their babies grow. It’s a bold melodrama anchored by a phenomenal performance from Cruz—something that might feel familiar if the film weren’t so arresting on its own terms too. 

On this week’s Little Gold Men podcast, Cruz speaks with David Canfield about her friendship with Almodóvar, how they try to protect their relationship when they work together, and the scenes he’s written for her that nobody has seen yet. Listen to the episode above, and read a partial transcript of the interview below. For more on this week’s episode, go here. 

Vanity Fair: Well, last we spoke, you told me that Pedro Almodóvar called you when you were 18 years old, and I wanted to start there, right at the beginning. That was the first time you’d spoken. What do you remember about that call? Do you look back on it now as a life-changing moment?

Penélope Cruz: Completely life-changing. It was like an old friend that was calling back after a long time, it didn’t feel new. It didn’t feel he was someone new in my life, maybe because I knew him so well from cinema. But so many incredible things have happened to me because of him and because of this relationship, and he’s like another family member. He’s not just someone I work with.

You’ve said you can’t hide anything from him. I’m wondering, is there a kind of freedom in that for you as an actor? How does that inform the way you are in his movies?

I prefer it to be this way because also he can’t lie to me either. So if I do something and he’s not convinced, he will tell me, but if he doesn’t, I will see it anyway. And we know that about each other, we know that we can feel each other, read each other’s minds almost. And it’s good because we never abuse the confidence of, Oh, we are good friends, or we relax on set with each other. No, no, no, no. We almost changed the way we behave with each other on set and become a little more distant. We didn’t plan that, but I think we do it to protect the relationship and the work.

Has that evolved over time from film to film? Or was it always like that for you?

Always like that. Maybe at the beginning, the first couple of movies, we were more like, ha ha ha, because we have just met, and later we were becoming so close and knowing each other so well that it was like, Okay, yeah, we can laugh and joke when we are in a dinner. It doesn’t mean there is no humor on the set, some days there is, but it is all about the work and about protecting that, and that way we end up protecting also the friendship.

Yeah. You’ve known about this role in a very loose sense for over 20 years now, right? He told you about it around All About My Mother, that time. What do you remember about when he first told you about it? And I imagine it changed quite a bit from there.

He told me about the two women, what happens to them at the hospital, and he told me about playing the younger character because it was so long ago, but I always wanted to play the photographer. The photographer, Janis, she stayed with me all these years. So when he told me, I said, “Pedro, I remember you shared this with me.” And I think he didn’t remember that. He shares with me all the stories he’s thinking about and then he forgets. Because I don’t keep asking him, “Oh, by the way, when are you going to do this?” I’m very respectful to that. But last month he shared an incredible story to us, and now we are all wondering, Is he going to do that? Because he has this great imagination and is always creating. He’s always writing three things at the same time.

 Do you have other stories that he’s told you in your head still from over the years, like roles that you might like to play?

There was one scene that he described to me that it was a panic attack, and I read that somewhere and then it was not in any of the scripts, and that is always my mystery: Pedro, where was that panic attack thing? It was incredible because the description of it, of how it happened, it was so good and so scary. I don’t know if it was part of any of the movies that we’ve done. He never showed it, but I will keep reminding him because that is in some of his drawers and it was brilliant.

Well, let’s talk a little bit about Janis, who is such a complicated character, and she’s someone who has to hide quite a bit, without spoiling anything. How did you start to figure her out, get into her head space? What was that process like for you?

We rehearse, like, five months almost. Janis expressed her feelings in a very different way than I do. In a situation like that, I would be crying all day long. It’s my tool for sanity, to be able to cry, to express myself out of happiness, emotion, sadness, anger. It’s just really therapeutical for me, but for some people that’s hard.

Janis is harder than me in that way, is not much in contact with her own emotions. And when we started rehearsing, Milena and I would start reading and would start crying because it was so strong, the script and what happens to them, and he was very patient and he said, “I understand we’re going to go through this process. You can cry all you want now, but we’re not going to have your own tears mixed with the ones of the characters, and these characters don’t cry as much as you.” We got what he wanted to, where, who he wanted to get, but that took a while because it was like, start reading and look at all the situations that they go through.

And once we found that, which is the tone for part of the beginning after she finds the news, when I went back and watched it, I understood very well. He showed me half an hour in the middle of this shooting, and I understood. It’s almost like a thriller, it’s almost like a ticking bomb. And that’s what I was feeling like for two months of the shooting. It was such an adrenaline trip, like, building up to that moment where she’s going to explode and confess.

And in that moment, he allowed me to be able to have that emotional release where she’s crying, screaming, throwing up in the floor of the bathroom. The audience needs that release with her at that point, but not before. And to get that, it was necessary to have all those months of releasing our own feelings in respect of the characters and drawing that to be able to get into that tone of contention and that ticking bomb. And then at the point when she confesses, okay, then that is a release that she needs and the audience will really need. I think that’s what makes him so incredible as a director.

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