A brutal beauty
The sight of the luminous Penelope Cruz eating a waffle could be enough to drive a stake through the heart of the anti-carbohydrate craze for good.
“I crave carbs the most,” Cruz says over breakfast at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. While discussing her latest movie, the Italian feature “Don’t Move,” which filmed in Rome, Cruz tells of ordering pasta for breakfast after long night shoots. “It is a healthy diet,” she says.
The Spanish actress, who peppers the conversation with the words claro, verdad and si -- of course, true and yes -- has homes in Los Angeles and her hometown of Madrid, and was on a short break from working on the movie “Bandidas” with friend Salma Hayek in Mexico.
“We get together at Salma’s house and we fry cheese,” she says. On the set, she adds, “We are either eating, or talking about food, or talking about men -- nothing else.” That last subject, though, is decidedly off-limits to strangers.
Cruz, 30, who has been acting since she was 15, makes it a policy never to discuss her private life in a public forum. “There are things that are just for yourself, your family, your friends.”
She is, however, more than willing to talk about other passions, the latest being her role in “Don’t Move.” A dark love story based on a popular Italian book called “Non Ti Muovere” by Margaret Mazzantini, “Don’t Move” was written by Mazzantini and her husband, Italian actor Sergio Castellitto, who also directed and starred in the film.
Cruz plays Italia, a woman who’s been regularly beaten by life, whose path crosses that of a successful doctor, Timoteo (Castellitto). After a brutal beginning -- Timoteo rapes Italia -- they fall into an often painful love affair. Cruz is well aware of the controversial nature of the characters’ meeting, and in no way seeks to justify a love story that starts with a rape.
But, she explains carefully, the movie strives to make audiences understand that these characters are extremely damaged; they are not normal people. “We cannot look at this movie thinking we’re going to see a Walt Disney movie. It’s a movie about that part of life that is dark,” she says. “It hurts to watch it, but it also has so much hope, so much beauty, it makes you feel it’s worth it.”
She cried for hours when she read the script, she says. “I fell in love with this character. I felt, ‘How can somebody have such a miserable life, and all those things going wrong as a child -- self-destructive patterns -- and feel that she doesn’t deserve anything in life, that love is something that happens in movies or to rich people, and that she has the same rights as her dog?’ ”
Metamorphosis
Cruz’s physical attributes are transformed in the film, to suit a character whose looks are described as those of a clown who wandered away from the circus. Her walk is “like a dog that is so afraid that she walks very close to the wall to protect herself.”
Though the makeup is startlingly effective, Cruz says it took only about 40 minutes to apply.
“It’s not about ‘Let’s make her ugly,’ but let’s make the look of a woman that doesn’t eat well, doesn’t go to the doctor, hasn’t gone to the dentist in years. Everything that was on the skin had a reason, not just to be ugly in a silly way.”
Cruz says she had so much respect for what the author had created, “I felt like the characters were already alive. And I didn’t want to disappoint her or Sergio, so for me, I felt so alive every minute of that movie, wanting to completely forget about myself and give them everything I have.” And anytime her ego or fear came up during filming, she says, she felt as though Italia slapped it down.
“It’s the character I love the most from my whole career,” she asserts, then adds her roles with filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, and a part in the 1998 film “La Nina de Tus Ojos” (“The Girl of Your Dreams”) to her list of favorites. “It’s why I decided to be an actor, to be in this kind of movie that inspired me so much. That this is talking about life and human behavior ... “ with honesty, “just things the way they are.”
Cruz says she feels grateful that she’s been able to see the world the way it is, even in all its suffering. Years ago, she worked in Calcutta for a week alongside Mother Teresa (and has since returned to visit the mission). The experience gave her a deeply felt perspective. “People complain too much. They need to be in places where you see you have no reason to complain if you’re healthy, and have a plate of food every day in front of you, a family that loves you. All the basic things that sound like blah-blah-blah-blah boring, at the end if you forget about those, you have nothing.”
A life lesson
She speaks of seeing babies abandoned in the middle of the street in Calcutta, of a man living in a cardboard box half the size of the alcove she’s sitting in.
“He was completely paralyzed, he could only move the head, and he’d been there for so many years in that little hole. An aunt was taking care of him, and that was his life. I saw hell,” Cruz says emphatically. “I saw hell.”
She recalls wondering how she could possibly go back to her comfortable life -- with the career and the bank account -- after what she had witnessed, but Mother Teresa advised her.
“She said don’t make a mistake of changing your life or changing your job because you’ve been put in a privileged position because of your job. Use it; use it for things like this that you’ve seen here. Even if you help one person, even if you give one penny, if everybody would do that, it would make a difference. So don’t change what you have, use that to help.”
Verdad.
When the check comes to the table, Cruz smiles brightly and asks, “May I invite?” After a moment, it was understood that she was asking to pay for the meal, literally translating the Spanish, ¿Te puedo invitar?
“You don’t say ‘invite’ here?” She covers her face and moans, “Oh, no, that’s going to be in the interview, that I don’t speak English.”
She needn’t worry; her charm is easy to translate.