Penélope Cruz is apologising for not making it to London for our interview, but her plans fell through the day before when her nanny discovered she had Covid. “We had very close contact so I just can’t risk travelling to another country or the kids testing positive,” she explains to me over Zoom, appearing on screen with her signature smoky-eye make-up and an immaculate manicure, despite recent travails. It’s a surprisingly mundane situation for an international film star to find herself in, but since becoming a mother to her two children – Leo, 11, and Luna, 8 – Cruz has set very clear priorities for herself. “I don’t do long trips, and I try to work in my own city when I can, because I want to raise my kids myself,” she says. “I’ve been lucky like that, and I hope it continues, because it’s kind of a gamble, to try to balance both.”
It feels rather apt that childcare challenges should have been the cause of this last-minute change of plans, given that Cruz is here to talk about a film that takes motherhood as its central theme. Her seventh collaboration with the visionary director Pedro Almódovar, Parallel Mothers is a Spanish-language drama that brilliantly explores the nature of the maternal bond in all its guises, placing a deeply personal story of two single mothers bound by unexpected ties within a wider historical framework about the debt we owe to generations past. Cruz plays Janis, an independently minded photographer in her late thirties who accidentally falls pregnant but decides to keep the baby, while her co-star Milena Smit portrays the adolescent Ana, who becomes a reluctant mother after a traumatic sexual assault.
For Cruz, the strength of Almódovar’s direction lies in his open-minded attitude towards motherhood. “I love that he presents all these different ways of being a mother, and doesn’t judge any of them,” she says. Take Ana’s well-heeled, conservative mother Teresa, who delivers a devastating speech confessing she has never had a maternal instinct; Almódovar’s sensitive treatment of the scene saves her from becoming a monster. “You hear that monologue and you understand why that woman feels that way,” says Cruz simply.
Although Parallel Mothers only went into production recently, its genesis dates back much further. Nearly two decades ago, Almodóvar outlined the initial premise to Cruz, envisaging at the time that she might play the young Ana, but it was the character of Janis who struck a chord with the actress, partly because of their shared passion for photography. However, Almodóvar was not to revisit the idea until 2020. “When he called me during the first lockdown to talk to me about it, I told him, Pedro, I know this story – you told it to me long ago,” says Cruz. So began an intensive four-month rehearsal period that was at once emotionally draining and professionally very satisfying. “I can’t imagine doing a movie with a role like this and not having time together to ‘cook’ everything, time to make mistakes and find answers,” she reflects.
At the heart of the film’s compelling narrative is a near-impossible moral dilemma with which Janis grapples for the best part of a year; it is Cruz’s ability to convey this sense of a divided self – outwardly calm, inwardly ravaged – that makes her performance so subtle, imbuing every scene with a tension that fizzes just beneath the surface. There were times during rehearsals, she tells me now, that the strain of such a visceral experience took her beyond the point of exhaustion. “Sometimes, at the end of the day, I was not a person… I just had to be picked up from the floor, and Pedro, Milena and I would help each other – we might take an extra hour to cry it out, to attempt to come back to reality, because it wasn’t like you could just press a button,” she recalls. “I didn’t want to go home taking that energy with me.”
Cruz works hard to set psychological boundaries between her real and dramatic lives, though she admits it is sometimes not possible. “The door is always open and things can come through – your own traumas, your own fears, your feelings of love… All of that will come through, whether you want it or not,” she says. In some ways, being a mother herself made playing Janis a more harrowing experience – “more obsessive and more scary” – but at the same time, she feels it strengthened her performance, “because I understand on an even deeper level what it is to love and fear for a child”. Motherhood, she says, changed her indelibly from the day her son was born. “Even for someone like me, who has been very clear about wanting children ever since I was a little girl, dreaming about that – still, those first few days and months are so shocking, no?” she confides. “But it’s the best thing, because it means you’ll never put yourself first again. To always think about somebody else first is so healthy, and it’s where a lot of happiness can come from.”
Unlike many of her Hollywood peers, Cruz truly seems to have found a sense of fulfilment that does not rely solely on her career – helped, perhaps, by the strong family values she has inherited from her parents and grandparents, and now hopes to pass on to her own children. (“All of us in the family are very tied together,” she says.) Still, there’s no sign of her professional ambition waning: currently, she is stepping behind the camera to direct and produce a documentary film whose subject she cannot divulge but that is clearly very close to her heart. “It’s really moving for me, and it took me many years to make the decision to go ahead, but I need to do it,” she tells me, enigmatically. And could another collaboration with her old friend Almodóvar be on the cards? “I love the whole experience of working with Pedro, but I never ask him when it will happen,” says Cruz. “I really respect his processes, and I know that if there’s something right for me, he’ll call.”
‘Parallel Mothers’ is in cinemas now.
