There is not a minute to lose. There are ovations before which not even Penélope Cruz, who has experienced quite a few, can remain indifferent. “I’m amazed,” Pe says this Wednesday when recalling the applause received in the Sala Grande of the Lido in Venice. Her team points out: “It was 15 minutes, right?”. She immediately corrects: “No, it was 16!”.
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Bunker, the film by French director Florian Zeller, starring alongside her husband, Javier Bardem, was one of the big hits of the day at the Mostra. “It was very moving, really, the audience’s reaction. Besides, we had only seen it once and it wasn’t finished yet and I already liked it a lot, it moves me deeply. But of course, seeing it with an audience…”.
In the film, Bardem plays an architect who agrees to build a bunker for a tech billionaire, a professional and moral decision that ends up opening a rift in their marriage. Around that couple, Zeller builds a story about fear, power, money, and the feeling of living in an increasingly threatening world.
The Madrid-born actress estimates that about 30% of the projects she has rejected clashed with her ideals or principles
The day after the triumph and the red carpet, the Madrid-born actress appears relaxed and smiling in a conversation with several Spanish media on the first floor of the Excelsior hotel, the most emblematic of the Lido. It is a great professional moment. Three very different films (The Invite, La bola negra, and Bunker) have coincided practically in the same year and all three have received extraordinary reception. One of them, La bola negra, is also among the three preselected to represent Spain at the Oscars. So much so that some are already considering the possibility of a second statuette for Penélope. An article these days speculated precisely about that option. Her reaction was much less solemn: “To the person who sent me that piece, I can’t tell you what I answered because I got so nervous that I had to delete what I said afterwards.”
She is at home here. She speaks Italian, is very beloved, and this festival awarded her the Volpi Cup five years ago for Parallel Mothers (2021), in addition to having premiered many of her latest titles here, such as Loving Pablo (2017) — also with Bardem —, Official Competition (2021), or Ferrari (2023).
Moments like these are not just a matter of vanity. “It’s not so much food for the ego, which is true that in any of those moments one can feel a boost, which is healthy and human, but it’s not my engine, it’s not what gives me happiness.” They are, rather, a way of looking to the future: “It’s knowing that when you have a year like this, it’s adding more chances for interesting characters and scripts to keep emerging. And that is really what matters to me about this job and what has mattered to me since day one.”
On success at the Lido: “One can feel a boost, which is healthy and human, but it’s not my engine, it’s not what gives me happiness”
Accepting new films, ultimately, but also being able to reject them. Cruz advocates the value of “no” when building a career. “I think it’s a combination of luck and also having been able to say no to things that were very tempting but were not right for that moment.” A decision she had to learn to make very early: “Starting at 16, I didn’t understand that so soon, just a few years later, I would have to be the one saying no to something. But even so, I forced myself to do it and then I was always glad.”
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“Careers are not built only on yeses, but on the times it’s hard, but your heart tells you: that is a no.” Some of those rejections also had reasons of conscience: when asked how many times she had discarded a project because it clashed with her ideals or principles, she estimated “maybe about 30% of the time it was something like that.” The rest, she explained, were projects she simply felt were not worth it. And there appears, for her, one of the greatest privileges that success provides: “The greatest luck, if you are doing well in this career, is being able to wait, being able to say no to a project and wait for the next one to appear.”
Everything, she admits, changed when she became a mother. Before, she had a hectic pace: “I worked nonstop, it’s just that I didn’t want to do anything else but shoot and I shot three, four films a year.” Then she slowed down a lot, usually staying at one film a year, or two if the shoots were not very long. And now, besides the quality of the projects, logistics weigh heavily. Even more so when working with her husband and father of her children, with whom she normally tries to alternate shoots. “With Bunker, also in that sense, logistics, which is really one of the things that worry me the most, it was Madrid for two months in the studios next to Netflix.”
The couple issue has inevitably hovered these days. Cruz and Bardem play a married couple again, but she rules out making it a habit. “We can’t say: come on, let’s do one a year or one every two years. But we found no reason to say no to this. And the truth is yes, I enjoyed it, also knowing that now we will leave a few years without working.”
On Bardem: “We understand each other very well on set, but we wouldn’t want to risk working together all the time”
And she goes further: “If I thought we had to submit to something like that, and especially playing a couple, something like that every year, I think it would be dangerous to work very often as a couple. And we understand each other very well on set, but I think we wouldn’t want to risk working all the time together just because or because it’s easier.”
For two days now, the same question has been repeated: how much of themselves is in those dialogues. Cruz carefully separates fiction and private life, although she admits that acting can open doors that are difficult to keep closed. “There are many things that I have been able to give outlet to and put into words through a character.” Not only in a love story: “It has freed many ghosts and many fears or much anger, many things that through characters I have been able to get out of me and in the end that is health too.”
And she sums it up herself: “It’s not using your work as therapy, but naturally it is a bit like that.” A kind of psychoanalysis, that is, quite well paid.
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