Victoria Abril Turns Up the Heat in Scorchingly Sexy ‘Lovers’

Victoria Abril never plays it safe.

In Pedro Almodovar’s controversial “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” Abril took a bath with a most unusual toy. And in Almodovar’s “High Heels,” she had a fling with a female impersonator.

In her latest film, “Lovers,” currently playing at the Music Hall in Beverly Hills and the Esquire in Pasadena, the Spanish actress makes Sharon Stone look like Shirley Temple.

In fact, the ads for the film advise patrons that “Lovers” contains scenes of an “explicit nature.”

Based on an actual 1955 Spanish murder scandal, “Lovers” focuses on a young man (Jorge Sanz) from the provinces who comes to Madrid to marry his virginal fiancee. Abril, who received the 1991 best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival for her role, plays his landlady, a beautiful widow who supports herself through petty cons. The two have a torrid affair that eventually leads to murder.

Abril says she is not surprised by the controversy her films have met in America. “I am used to it,” she says matter-of-factly. In Europe, though, such explicit nudity in films “is nothing. You can see that on the beach.”

Abril, 32, made her film debut at 15 in Paco Lara Polop’s “Obsession,” and first worked with “Lovers” director Vincente Aranda that same year in “Cambio de Sexo.”

“I have made 60 films,” Abril says. “I do four or five films a year. Maybe this year I do none because I haven’t found a script.”

She does hope to team up with Almodovar soon. “The problem is he is writing three stories at the same time. I don’t now which one he is going to finish first. I know I am in one of them--a rough comedy.”

Abril, who calls Paris home, prefers New York to Los Angeles. “It doesn’t feel so foreign to me,” she says. “It is an international town. People are on the street. It is not grounded by the highway. In Los Angeles, you have to go to Venice to see people.”