All about Eva

It’s a sign of real progress that Will Smith’s latest film, Hitch, sees him playing opposite the Cuban-American actress Eva Mendes. A few years ago, a major studio would have balked at such a prospect, even if Smith has the knack of inducing colour blindness in American audiences. But with Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek blazing a trail for Hispanic actresses in Hollywood, so that Spanish imports such as Pen?lope Cruz and Paz Vega are also prospering, times have changed, and the Miami-born, LA-raised Mendes is happy to take advantage.

In part, that’s because the 30-year-old is old enough to remember the days when Latin actors were restricted to playing drug dealers or sultry vixens. “In the beginning, it was almost enough for me to say, ‘This isn’t worth it.’

Sometimes, I didn’t even get the chance to get in the room to audition, and that really hurt,” she recalls. “I’d always be asked to do the part with an accent, even if it wasn’t in the script. The first time I stood up for myself and didn’t do it, I felt great. I said to the director, ‘I’m sorry, I respect you, but I don’t think it’s relevant.’ He said, ‘Thanks,’ and that was that.”

Mendes didn’t get that part. But now directors are queuing up to work with her. Her breakthrough role as Denzel Washington’s girlfriend in 2001’s Training Day might have seen her playing a sexy Latina straight out of central casting, but since then, she’s appeared opposite Johnny Depp in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and was a revelation as the airhead wannabe actress who befriends Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear’s conjoined twins in the Farrelly brothers’ Stuck on You.

Unlike the desperately earnest Lopez, Mendes is a comedy natural. In Hitch, she’s a tough-talking New York gossip columnist who exposes Smith’s secret life as a “date doctor”, a matchmaker who advises hapless men how to score with the women of their dreams. That’s the cue for the pair to fall in love, but not before the obligatory period of combative sparring. Not that Mendes is a huge fan of romantic comedies. “I’m not a chick-flick girl,” she says, perched in a Honolulu hotel suite that overlooks the Pacific. “Like, Sideways is my favourite movie at the moment. But I do like being able to act stupid. I love it when I see goofball-style stuff.” She says she finds comedies easier to act in than straight dramas. “It’s harder to pull off a comedic scene than a dramatic one, but I feel less pressure doing them, because I’m not trying to be funny. I’m just trying to let it all go.”

In a floral-print dress and with her perfectly coiffed hair, Mendes looks more like a 1950s starlet than a modern-day actress. She represents Revlon cosmetics as well, but, with her curves and ebullient personality, she couldn’t be more different from the hordes of stick-thin blondes who flock to LA in search of stardom. In fact, Mendes claims she avoids other actors socially, although there were rumours that she and Damon were an item while making Stuck on You. “I wouldn’t date an actor. I think one crazy actor in the family is enough, and I’ll be the crazy actor,” she smiles.

Despite their dodgy reputation, she found playing a gossip hound in Hitch an enlightening experience. “I remember one of them saying, ‘I amuse, I don’t abuse,’ and I thought that was interesting. What I learnt is that they’re not out to get us personally. It’s not like, ‘I want to bring her down.’ They’re doing their job, and that’s about getting the story, whatever it takes,” notes Mendes. “I did have problems playing someone that icy. At the beginning, she does have a ‘f*** off’ sign on her forehead.”

If Hitch revolves around the premise that all men need advice when it comes to women, then Mendes believes there are a few females out there who could do with some tips, too. “A dating class in high school would have been great, because it can be scary out there. I’ve never had a really bad experience, but I’ve had a lot of awkward ones, where it’s just weird and not fun.

You know, when it’s the end of the date and you’re thinking, ‘I really don’t want to kiss this guy,’ and it’s how do you do that nicely. Or you do want to kiss the guy, and how do you do that nicely? It’s all nerve-racking.”

But apparently not as daunting as kissing Smith in Hitch. “Will put me at ease and he does smell good, but I was so nervous, I thought I’d have some comfort food. For me, that means a toasted tuna sandwich with chips (crisps) smashed up in the middle of it. Will saw me as I was biting into it, and he just went, ‘What are you doing?’ That made me even more nervous, and I started brushing my teeth obsessively. But it seems to work in the movie.”

According to Mendes, Smith was rather more laid-back to work with than Washington. “I like them both, but they’re totally different types of actor. Denzel’s very serious, and Will is just this force of energy who is funny and goofy. But Denzel really helped me out. I mean, Training Day put me on the map, and I had been at the point of quitting before I got that. It gave me a lot of confidence to work with him.” Before Training Day, Mendes had been acting in horror movies such as Urban Legends: Final Cut and in little-seen gangster flicks such as Exit Wounds.

Hitch took an impressive $45m on its opening weekend in America, but with its emphasis on the rules and tactics of dating, an activity Americans take very seriously, it may not have the same impact in Europe. “It’s not so much of a game outside the States. It’s, ‘Hey, I like you,’” admits Mendes. “I think Europeans and some Latin men are more easy-going. American men are less upfront about what they want, and I like people to be upfront with me. I think it’s just a cultural thing. I believe Americans are still sexually uptight. We still suffer from that puritanical thing.”

Mendes is certainly coy about her own love life and declines to name her boyfriend. “We’ve been together for three years now. I don’t want to say too much about him because he’s not here, but he’s my producing partner, too. He’s a walking brain, and I love that. I like a well-read man with brains. I’m a smart girl, but I’m not as intellectual as I’d like to be, so I look for that in a man.” Indeed, she’s hardly overflowing with confidence when it comes to her own abilities. “The truth is that I’m not a trained actress who’s gone to drama school. I don’t come from a theatre background, and I’ve always been quite insecure about my acting. I’m feeling more and more like an actress now, which is good. But I’m no Cate Blanchett. The reason I love acting so much, though, is that I find out something new about myself every time I do a job. On this, I learnt to trust myself more and not to force it. If I’m feeling it, then the audience will feel it.”

Mendes’s route into acting was a haphazard one that began while she was studying marketing at college in LA.

“I was really ignorant, actually. I dropped out of college because I met a manager, as you do living in LA, who said I could make a lot of money doing commercials and videos.

I was looking for an excuse to quit school anyway, but I was such a dork because, of course, I didn’t get one acting job. But I did get a video, and that led to representation, and then one thing led to another. I did a lot of bad stuff,” she laughs.

That video happened to star one Will Smith in his earlier incarnation as a rapper. Not that he recalled her being in the background when Mendes auditioned for Hitch. “I said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ and he said, ‘No,’” she says, with a grin. Her days of being eye candy in music promos are long gone now. She will next be seen as the female lead in the upcoming Luke and Owen Wilson comedy, The Wendell Baker Story, as well as alongside Julianne Moore and Maggie Gyllenhaal in the ensemble piece Trust the Man.

Now that her career has moved on, her only regret is that her extended family in Cuba have yet to see her most recent work. Her parents fled Cuba just after the revolution in 1959, moving first to Florida and then to LA, but the majority of her family remain on the island, and the local video stores don’t stock the latest releases. “My family there only have my first movie, Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, on video. It’s like, ‘I’ve done some okay stuff, why that one?’” she wails. Like most Cuban-Americans, she’s no fan of Fidel Castro and has yet to go to Cuba. “I’m torn. I’d like to wait before going back, but I kind of want to see it now. It’ll change so much once Castro goes, but I don’t know if I could take going back now. I mean, those are my people. To see them trapped in a prison would be like visiting a zoo. It’s like, ‘Hey, take a look at these beautiful animals in a cage.’ Going to Cuba is almost like an amusement for some people. ‘Oh, these people are so beautiful and amazing.’ But tourists get to leave.”

Finding the time for a holiday would be an achievement, but Mendes is too cautious to proclaim that this is her moment in Hollywood. “I guess it’s a defence mechanism, but I can’t feel like that,” she says. “Being in a movie that I genuinely like, with people in it that I genuinely like, is good enough for me. I just want to keep it going and keep reading those scripts. I don’t ever want to act out of desperation.”







Hitch opens on March 4

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