By Edward Douglas
There’s little question that actress Penélope Cruz is one of Spain’s most beautiful exports, but who knows if any of us would have ever heard of her if not for her breakout role in Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother in 1999, which made her a hot commodity in Hollywood. Seven years later and she’s reunited with the Spanish master for Volver in which she plays Raimunda, a high-strung mother who has to cover-up for her teen daughter when the girl accidentally kills her lecherous stepfather.
At the same time, her dead mother seems to have returned to life, something kept a secret by Raimunda’s sister, as Raimunda takes over the running of a restaurant to help hide the secret of her husband’s body in the freezer.
It’s really not that strange a premise when put side-by-side with Almodóvar’s previous comedy-thrillers, but it certainly may be Cruz’s finest acting performance to date, which may be why she’s already been getting awards and is likely to get more in the coming months.
ComingSoon.net attended a small press conference held by Cruz in New York City, while here for the 44th New York Film Festival.
ComingSoon.net: Do you know why Pedro wanted you to play the character of Raimunda with all of her strengths and vulnerabilities?
Penélope Cruz: Pedro always said that he needed somebody that could have a little bit of those opposites in her. He knows I can be very strong for some things and very vulnerable for others, and he knows I cry a lot, sometimes watching a TV commercial, and then I can be extremely strong for some things if I need to.
I am the first one surprised by those reactions sometimes but he knows me very well, and he knew that I was going to understand Raimunda and what a rollercoaster she is emotionally, you know?
Because you can find in that chaotic behavior, there is an order and I feel I can identify with her in those terms. As long as you understand yourself, you are free. So I feel she’s not crazy, but she’s emotionally up and down. I had days when we were touching three different genres in one day, when I was doing comedy in the morning, then drama, then comedy, then drama. I had to forget about all of that after three months of rehearsing.
I had all the information I needed. In the end, I already felt that I already had that connection with that character and I understood what I had to understand so you have to forget at that point we all had to forget about words and technique and all of the intellectual process of finding the characters and just be there taking care of one action at a time.
That’s the way Raimunda lives her life. And if not, she would be dead. She has no other choice. She has so many problems, so many things to take care of, that the only way to survive is by one action at a time. And that’s the only way for me. That was the only way to do this character. If not… the days that I didn’t do that I felt so overwhelmed. You could have made me completely blocked and paralyzed so, one thing at a time. It doesn’t matter what I want to be doing after lunch and what I want to do then, now is this.
This moment and it helped me a lot realizing that that’s how she lived her life.
CS: Do you think your character Raimunda is somewhat damaged?
Cruz: She is damaged, but has reasons to be. I think that’s what makes her like keep going. There’s so many things that she doesn’t want to look at and when she looks at them, she breaks down. When her mother comes back to life, it’s when she gets the opportunity to think what happened with her mother hurt her even more than what happened with her father, because she was someone she believed in and then she lost that trust.
To think that she’s gone forever and that they are never going to have the chance to solve those issues, she walks around with that heavy weight of unsolved issues with a family member that she really cared about. When she comes back to life, I feel like all those things that happened with her father, with her mother, with her daughter, with her husband, everything comes back to by confronting those things, she finds a peace that she has not had since that happened when she was a teenager. She’s damaged because of those things, but she keeps going. That’s one of the things that I love so much about this character.
CS: Was this a good movie for you as an actress making the transition from her 20s to her 30s?
Cruz: I feel like I am making a transition in playing characters that I couldn’t have played 10 years ago, because of many different reasons that were very real, so it’s great to have a character like this in a movie that is a homage to women’s solidarity, to family. It’s so needed to have more movies like that and more characters like that, and I’m very honored to be one of those women in that movie.
I was happy that I finally could play a woman, because I started working when I was a teenager, so I was doing the characters that I could do according to that age. Also I can play this mother, because my character gave birth when she was 14, so it had to be a young mother with a daughter who could almost use her same clothes.
All of that happens for a reason in the movie. I was ready for this character, but it’s one of the most difficult and most emotionally demanding characters.
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