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Cruz Control
By now, at least in American movies, there’s an unstated rule that says Penélope Cruz’s male co-stars must greet her appearance with a spell of awed silence meant to imply that her beauty is beyond words. Tom Cruise, in Vanilla Sky (2001), stops short and gazes in wonder the moment he lays his eyes on Cruz’s character. In Sahara (2005), Steve Zahn is briefly agog when he encounters the Spanish actress for the first time. Matt Damon, in All the Pretty Horses (2000), finds himself unable to process the exquisiteness of the woman peering back at him from beneath gleaming black tresses. “Did you see that little darlin’?” a fellow horseman asks Damon’s John Grady Cole, in the Billy Bob Thornton-directed western. But Cole can’t move, let alone respond, so taken is he with the lovely creature before him.
Great beauty is rarely a hindrance to an actress’ career, and Cruz’s distinctive allure—that skin, those eyes, that arched upper lip, which seems to bump up against the base of a long, slender nose— has helped make the 32-year old an international star. Yet, in part because Hollywood hasn’t always figured out how to meld her good looks with substantial roles, there’s a very real disconnect between the manner in which Cruz is viewed by the American film-going public and the way she’s perceived abroad. For the better part of 15 years, Cruz has been nabbing meaty roles in European movies, from Fernando Trueba’s Belle Epoque (1992), a romantic period piece from Spain that won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, to Sergio Castellitto’s Don’t Move (2004), an Italian picture that found the actress doing her best, a la Charlize Theron, to make us forget that she’s pretty. Of course, there are also her collaborations with Pedro Almodóvar, a fellow Spaniard who is directing Cruz for a third time in Volver. Featuring some of Cruz’s best work to date, Almodóvar’s estrogen-charged meditation on family and death arrived in theaters on November 3rd, 2006 courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.
Working in Europe, Cruz has typically managed to avoid the one-note “little darlin’” roles that she has sometimes been offered in the States. As MM sat down with her in New York, however, Cruz relayed that she’s not concerned about how her work in American movies measures up against the roles she has played in films made closer to home. “I’ve only done [about] six movies here and 30 in Europe,” Cruz says, “so that’s normal that I’ve found more complex characters there.”
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This story was published in the Fall 2006 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Like a Dream Come True / With an arresting performance in Pedro Almodóvar's Volver, Spanish superstar Penélope Cruz finally makes American audiences—and moviemakers—take notice of her talent
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