- Penélope Cruz opened up about turning 50 this April.
- “It’s a huge, beautiful thing,” she said.
- The actress also shared how she feels about discussing aging in general.
When an actress of a certain age agrees to an interview, she can almost always anticipate being asked about the number of years she’s been alive. Some people refuse to answer it (because why does it matter?), some indulge and celebrate it, and Penélope Cruz, as it turns out, falls somewhere in the middle. When she was younger, the aging question bothered her, she recently told Elle, but she’s flattered to be asked about turning 50.
The milestone will arrive in April—the 28th, to be exact. She’s among the pedestaled actresses whom Hollywood would freeze in time if possible, and she knows that. But she shrugs off the pressure—if she feels any at all.
“You know why I don’t worry about that?” she said. “Because people have been asking me about age since I was twenty-something. I was more bothered then than now,” she explained. In other words, the question is old news—no pun intended. “Now it makes more sense, to discuss turning 50,” she continued. “It’s a huge, beautiful thing, and I really want to celebrate that with all my friends. It means I’m here and I’m healthy, and it’s a reason to have a party.”
In her busiest era—when she was shooting four to five films a year—the age-related questions were relentless. “When I was 25, they would ask me these psychotic questions, things you would not believe, and the only weapon I would have was not to answer,” she explained. “Even now, on the red carpet, when they shout to ‘Turn around,’ I always pretend I didn’t hear what they said.”
It also helps that, now, she sticks to a slower schedule of about a movie a year. “My rhythm was crazy,” she recently told The Los Angeles Times. “It was flying back and forth nonstop, working in the middle of the night, waking up to answer emails, a total workaholic to the point where I was getting sick because there was no sleep. It was too much—for my mind especially. The level of stress was crazy. And then your body tells you, in a sneaky way when you least expect it, ‘Stop. Stop.’ By the time your body tells you that, you have a big price to pay from that burnout. That’s how it was ... but maybe that gave me the opportunity to work this other rhythm, like once per year.”
As she mentioned, she’s excited to celebrate 50, but when she spoke to The Times, she wasn’t exactly sure how. “All my friends are preparing me, like, ‘You are going to be forced to do a party this time,’” she said. “If you have a party with a lot of your friends that you haven’t seen in a long time, you end up super stressed out because you want to give all of them quality time and have conversations. But it’s loud and you cannot really hear each other and it becomes so stressful.”
She still has time to decide what to do—and to be frank, she has more important things to worry about. “I’m always worrying about everything,” she said. “So I don’t think I could worry anymore because of turning 50.”
Kayla Blanton is a freelance writer-editor who covers health, nutrition, and lifestyle topics for various publications including Prevention, Everyday Health, SELF, People, and more. She’s always open to conversations about fueling up with flavorful dishes, busting beauty standards, and finding new, gentle ways to care for our bodies. She earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University with specializations in women, gender, and sexuality studies and public health, and is a born-and-raised midwesterner living in Cincinnati, Ohio with her husband and two spoiled kitties.
