[Italian and intended to sound Italian, immersing herself for months,
studying five hours a day – ‘Torture,’ she smiles. Two years ago, she
appeared as the wife of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, in a
biopic called Loving Pablo – a Spanish-language film, in which she took
pains to shave away her Madrid accent to sound Colombian.
Cruz’s husband, Javier Bardem, played Escobar in that film. As soon
as production finished, they made another movie together, Everyone
Knows, which opened last year’s Cannes festival. Cruz and Bardem
walked the red carpet together, a walk that was transmitted on French
television: ‘Probably the most glamorous couple in international film
today,’ one pundit said to another on the broadcast, as they wondered
aloud whether they used their Oscars as bookmarks at home.
I ask Cruz about this moment, a time when their marriage, usually
kept so private, was under larger scrutiny. ‘The truth is,’ she says, ‘we
manage to still keep our relationship intact, by not sharing things that
are ours. We didn’t feel we were [on display] as a couple. We were two
actors, who happened to be a couple.’ Ten years ago, she says, she and
Bardem made a decision, ‘a really good decision for us, not to talk
about our relationship. It would feel very strange to do it a different
way. I just couldn’t do it.’
Her phone is on the table in front of her, concealed in a smart leather
case, and distractedly she flicks it open, wakens the screen, closes it
again. This is a half-conscious gesture, maybe that of a parent checking
for news from home, but she catches me looking
and she grins. She recently installed a new
language app, she says. ‘Mandarin. That made
my friends laugh.’
She wonders if her continued hunger for
learning is the result of becoming a parent. ‘If
I take my kid to a paediatrician I like to know
what I have to ask, and I want to know if I’m
convinced by the answer.’ Or if it comes from
the fact that, working in films, she deals with
the fictional all day. ‘So that in my life I like
non-fiction. I read a lot and in the last few
years it’s all been books about medicine, about
nutrition, about parenting, about hormones.’
Hormones?
‘Hormones rule the world,’ Cruz says, matter-of-factly. And then:
‘But I insist!’
After enough time in Cannes – a place where the traffic is stopped by
armed police so that cinemagoers in black tie can cross the road – you
get accustomed to surprises. Still, Cruz’s words catch me off guard and
she chuckles, pleased with the conversational swerve. ‘I bet you weren’t
expecting to talk about hormones. Okay. Hormones... There are times
in the life of a woman that have to be acknowledged, and understood,
and called by their name. There are too many taboos surrounding
women’s bodies and I think it equals a big lack of respect.’
Cruz pulls her scarf tighter around her shoulders and continues: ‘You
might be thinking, “What is the relationship between hormones and
respect?” It’s completely related. Words like “period”, “post-partum
depression”, “menopause”. Even today, those words, you bring them up
at a dinner table, everybody gets nervous. Even if it’s a group of women,
if men are also at the table, the energy gets very nervous. The peri-
menopause goes from 40 to 50, and nobody talks about that,’ she says.
‘Society keeps things as a taboo and I’m really angry about this. I feel
like everything that they’re asking us in interviews...’
And here she gestures out at Cannes proper, where several hundred
of the world’s film press are circulating. No doubt some of them are
asking actresses about their Harvey Weinstein horror stories, their
views on the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. Cruz continues:‘They ask us about the changes that have happened in the business over
the last couple of years, in terms of the movement towards equality for
women and respect for women. Of course it feels like there’s been some
improvement. But it’s only the beginning.’
She worries that too much attention has focused on actresses and on
imbalances within the film industry specifically. ‘I get to talk about
this,’ Cruz says, ‘but how many other women in other jobs never get a
microphone put close to them? They don’t get asked, how are you feeling
in your work environment, or even in your home. Are things fair? They
don’t get asked these questions. We still have so much to do.’Taking a helicopter view of Cruz’s career, you get the
definite sense she likes to keep her exposure to Hollywood
well-blended with work on Spanish and European films.
The Hollywood stuff hasn’t always been well-received by
critics, and in the early Noughties she was in three disap-
pointing adaptations (All The Pretty Horses, Captain
Corelli’s Mandolin and Vanilla Sky) in succession. She
has always stayed admirably loyal to projects that haven’t
landed well, though, and says this is because even bad reviews can be
used as fuel. ‘If you only got “yeses” and good reviews, and you didn’t
sometimes have films that were received in a more cold way? You would
not have the same hunger.’
Her two decades of collaboration with
Almódovar have been pretty much cloudless,
leading to a number of beloved films, includ-
ing 1999’s All About My Mother and 2006’s
Volver. This afternoon, Almódovar is in the
same Cannes bar as we are, unmistakable in a
lemon-yellow sports coat, his silver hair spiky
and wild. A bystander soon notices that the
legendary director and his even-more-legendary
muse have come together in the same place
and a photograph is requested.
Cruz agrees, shrugging off the camel-
coloured scarf to reveal the minidress beneath.
She poses beside Almódovar, who has been
watching her closely and who responds to her
by crying out: ‘Oy! Ah! Penél!’ He goes on to make several more
exclamations in Spanish – lavishing praise on her appearance, by the
sounds of it.
Once Cruz is sitting down again, I ask about Almódovar’s behaviour.
We’ve been talking about women’s bodies. About respect. Wasn’t she
tempted to correct him just then?
Her eyes widen. ‘What did he do wrong?’ she asks. ‘He didn’t do any-
thing wrong.’
I don’t know if it was wrong, I say. It’s just that, by the standards of
2019, the comments sounded out of place.
‘I don’t agree with that!’ Cruz says. ‘See, this is the problem. How we
deviate... This makes me furious. Constantly I see this happening.
We deviate from the important things, which really need change and
improvement, into things that don’t matter. Pedro was courteous.
Kind. He’s been my friend for more than 20 years. He loves me and I
love him. He cannot give me a compliment? Because I’m a woman?
No, sorry. He can give me all the compliments he wants. It’s the way he
does it. The words he uses, the tone he uses.’
It feeds back in to what she was saying earlier, Cruz says, about the
larger problems of gender inequality. She thinks we get sidetracked in
arguments about (say) whether a man should compliment a woman’s
appearance. Cruz sees this as a distraction from the ‘base’ issues, such as
the gender pay gap or timorous education about women’s bodies. ]Tatler August 2019 tatler.com‘He cannotcompliment me?Because I ama woman?No, sorry. Thismakes me furious.Are we crazy?’08-19COVERSTORY.indd 62 03/06/2019 10:00
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