How Penélope Cruz Builds Her Characters From the Ground Up

Penélope Cruz’s first role in a Pedro Almodóvar film was as a young woman giving birth on a bus in the opening moments of 1997’s “Live Flesh (Carne Trémula).” Twenty-five years later, the Academy Award–winning actor found herself again giving birth onscreen in her longtime mentor and friend’s “Parallel Mothers (Madres Paralelas).” As photographer Janis, Cruz anchors a story about a mix-up at the maternity ward that teeters between tender melodrama and intimate thriller.

When Cruz first read the script, she was bowled over. At the same time, “I was very scared about it,” she says. “But I actually love that feeling. Because it means it’s a big challenge, and it’s something new that’s gonna teach me a lot of things.” 

When she has ample time to prepare for a role of this caliber, she usually works with her acting coach, Juan Carlos Corazza. “But with Pedro, I arrive from zero. I don’t prepare anywhere else. I just do it with him,” she explains. “Because that’s the way we’ve done it from the beginning. And that’s what he expects, also, from his actors and actresses. He wants to create it together.”

For “Parallel Mothers,” Almodóvar carved out four months of rehearsal time, which, Cruz says, “felt very much like doing a play. It was great. And you can only achieve that by having enough time to just try everything and make mistakes and not be afraid of trying whatever comes up.” 

Such a lengthy process helped Cruz feel all the more grounded. And counterintuitively, it set her up to find surprises within her performance—and within the finished film. 

“I was not 100% aware of the aspects of the thriller,” she says of the film, “because [Almodóvar] never talked to us about that. It’s there in the script, but not as much as what you feel when you watch the movie.” 

She’s had people come up to her and tell her they thought Janis might be moved to murder at any given point in the movie. Such readings, she knows, were carefully planted by Almodóvar, who insisted she play a restraint that is at odds with the emotional turmoil her character goes through. 

That led to very intense shooting days. “What happened is that I would have to go to the hallway or to the street to just get that release and cry and scream, and then come back and do the scene again,” she recalls. “Because he’d said to us from the beginning, ‘You have to dry your own tears. Your own tears cannot mix with the ones of the characters.’ ” 

Cruz agreed to evoke this temperament for her performance, with one caveat: In a pivotal scene toward the end of the film, Janis would be allowed to break down. “I felt she needed that,” she explains. “I needed to give her that. And I felt the audience needed to go through that release with Janis.”

With “Parallel Mothers” netting Cruz some of her best reviews in years, the actor’s decadeslong career is showing no sign of slowing down, neither in the U.S. nor in her native Spain. Not that she sees any kind of division between her work in those two countries.

“You know, ​​I don’t see these as separate things—my work in America and my work in Europe. No, wherever they call me with something that is interesting and new and represents a challenge for me, that’s what I’ll do,” she says. “I see the whole thing as a school. We, as actors and actresses, are students of life, students of human behavior.”

After seven collaborations with the director, Cruz remains a stalwart fan of Almodóvar’s work; she’s still in awe of what he accomplished with his 2020 short film “The Human Voice.” And she is very much looking forward to his first feature-length film in English, an adaptation of Lucia Berlin’s “A Manual for Cleaning Women,” which will star Cate Blanchett. 

But Cruz is already looking further ahead, hatching plans for what she hopes to see the filmmaker tackle next. “It is my mission to convince him to do a musical,” she says. “He has amazing taste. He has an amazing ear. He has to do it.”