‘Parallel Mothers’ star Penelope Cruz on her intense working relationship with Pedro Almodovar

He describes her as his muse. She says he is that rarest of things: “A true artisan of this profession.” The collaboration between Penelope Cruz and Pedro Almodovar spans 25 years and seven films — their first picture together was Live Flesh in 1997 — and a friendship that extends close to 30 years. Their films have earned Cruz two of her four Oscar nominations, for Volver and for their latest picture Parallel Mothers. She is the beating heart of much of his finest work.

Key to the success of the collaboration is the fact the friendship and the working relationship are kept apart. “It seems like a different relationship,” she says. “Almost like we are different people. When we are rehearsing or shooting, there is less joking with each other. We never feel too relaxed around each other. I love him and I trust him 100% of the time, and at the same time I’m scared. Not scared of him. I’m scared of… I don’t want to disappoint him. And I know he’s going to be honest and he’s going to be tough. And that is a great fear to have on the set. I’d much rather have that than have somebody that always tells you everything is right, because we know it’s not.”

There is undoubtedly a creative kinship that connects them on many levels. They share, for example, a meticulous preoccupation with details. In Almodovar’s filmmaking, “There is a reason for every colour, every material. When he has chosen maybe red, which he doesn’t use a lot in this movie, but when he does there is a meaning. You walk into that set and you feel it. And it gives you a lot of information that is not put into words, but visually it has an effect on you.”

Cruz offers an example — when her Parallel Mothers character Janis consequentially meets young mother Ana (Milena Smit) in the maternity hospital. “We are both alone giving birth, very lonely souls, and he creates this oasis, and the colours are pastel, more quiet, more hopeful. Nothing is there just because.”

The actress, meanwhile, reveals that she chooses different scents and perfumes for each character she plays, something that can trigger a visceral response if she encounters it at a later date. “If it’s a character that has suffered a lot and then I smell that scent somewhere, I run away.” The scent she chose for Janis she describes as “like a baby’s perfume”.

The filmmaker and actress both bring an unusual degree of intensity to the set. “He takes it extremely, extremely seriously, the whole process, to the point where sometimes we worry about him because he arrives on the set like it’s a question of life or death,” she says.

“We worry because we want him to be happy and to enjoy, but at the same time, he’s also the happiest when he’s creating.”

The concern runs both ways, with Almodovar frequently scolding Cruz for her bruising emotional engagement with her characters. The most recent instance occurred during the Parallel Mothers shoot, a traumatic scene depicting a life-changing confession — Janis learned her baby and that of another woman were swapped in the hospital, but kept the infor­mation to herself for many months.

“He literally had to pick me up from the floor, because I could not come out of the fiction. It took me a while and he got worried. He said, ‘No, but why it has to be this way? I want you to do the same thing, but not suffer.’ And that’s what actually took me out and brought me back to the present, because I started laughing and telling him, ‘Pedro, do you realise you’re the last person in this world who would have credibility telling me something like that? Because every day I get worried for you with the way you approach every single step of the process.’”

Flawed, complex, magnetic, strong: Janis is a gift of a role for an actress. Particularly when the initial draft arrived like a lifeline during the first pandemic lockdown.

“In the middle of all of that, he calls me and says, ‘I’m writing, and I’m writing for you.’ And that was really good news. First of all, he was healthy, but also he was creating. And then a month later, he sent me the first version. I read it in my house, and I remember being blown away, completely in love, obsessed with the character after one read, and with the story.”

Juggling careers

Cruz has reached a point in her career where she balances work choices with her home life and with the schedule of husband Javier Bardem — with whom she lives in Madrid, together with their two children. She says they never work at the same time. “I don’t make four movies a year like I did before, because now I’m a mother and that’s my priority. Maybe I make one movie a year, or two if they’re not too long, and especially if I can shoot them in the city where we live. It’s not the rhythm I had before. I did that for many years, and that’s given me the oppor­tunity to now be able to choose. I feel very grateful for that.”

Recent projects include L’Immensita directed by Emanuele Crialese (Respiro), Cruz’s fourth time working in Italian. “It’s such a modern, beautiful film. He has an incredible eye, great vision and is such a poet.” There are even, she reveals, a couple of musical numbers in the film. Next up, she will play another Italian, Laura Ferrari, wife of sports-car entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari (played by Adam Driver) in a biopic by Michael Mann.

But before any of that, an overdue party is on the cards, marking the ‘his and hers’ matching Oscar nominations that she and Bardem secured — in his case for playing Desi Arnaz in Aaron Sorkin’s Being The Ricardos. “We were jumping around, and I was crying for three hours that day. Really, really excited, and could not believe it was happening at the same time, the same year for both of us. Kind of magical, actually. But we haven’t done a proper celebration yet. I think we should.”

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