Penelope Cruz gives good hotel suite. Maybe it’s because she is foreign, but something feels very right about swishing through the revolving doors of the Mandarin Oriental in Knightsbridge on a rain-lashed Saturday night on the promise of a good time with the greatest film star to emerge from southern Europe since Sophia Loren. Obviously, Sophia is a “dear friend” of la Cruz, but, let’s face it, who isn’t at this point? The 41-year-old mother of two even managed to go out with Tom Cruise for almost three years, though she is ruthlessly discreet on such subjects, which probably explains why she is unusually popular in the film industry. In a business so riven with bitchiness, it requires its own Defcon scale (Defcon Megacow!), industry friends tell me that Cruz is adored by everyone, from big execs to her female colleagues and their husbands.
Her London crew includes the photographer Mert Alas and supermodel Kate Moss, who she’s fond of cuddling up with on Instagram. But it’s the auteurs she really goes bonkers for. “I go for lunch with Pedro [Almodovar], and I’m, like, ‘Why am I not recording this?’” she tells me, in an accent as tangy and impenetrable as gazpacho. “It’s the same with Woody Allen. I had a conversation with Woody about doctors that I still treasure.” Do tell.
“Well, I’m also a little bit of a hypochondriac, so I realised my connection with him was talking about doctors. Then he would give me all his attention.” She smiles. “One day, he stopped shooting [Vicky Cristina Barcelona, for which she won her Oscar] to go to the dermatologist, because he saw a new freckle on his hand because of the Spanish sun. I asked him, ‘Just out of curiosity, why don’t you wait until 6pm, when we wrap?’ And he said…” At this point, Cruz has to break off for a moment to laugh. “He said, ‘It could be too late.’”
Anyway, it’s the night before the Baftas, so Penny (which I imagine nobody calls her) is hosting a party with LancÔme at Kensington Palace. Before she slips into her Marchesa cocktail dress, she has found a morsel of time to discuss one of her more lucrative career roles: ambassadress for the make-up giant. Ooh, the control, though. I arrive at the specified time and am instructed by text to wait in the lobby, which is slowly filling up with company executives in black tie awaiting a shuttle bus up to the palace in time to see Cruz’s movie-star friends arrive. A clock ticks and a Penelope-induced hush has befallen proceedings when the PR materialises at my elbow and solemnly intones: “It’s time.”
Click-click down a marble hallway, into a waiting lift and up to some megabucks floor of suites above. In these situations, you can always tell you’re about to hit the inner sanctum when the outside world gets so muffled by cash that the air tastes different. It’s all making me feel slightly jittery, frankly. Is it actually Obama on the other side of that door? The Pope, perhaps? No, no. Instead, by a three-piece suite floating in a sea of chintz, I find a Spanish woman so insanely radiant, you have to be able to identify a photograph of her if you want to be granted citizenship of her country.
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Is that true, I ask. That you’re on the citizenship test now? “I read it like you read it, so maybe,” she says — but obviously it comes out as “thho maybe”. Cruz isn’t Spanish. She is hilariously Spanish. She is also a notoriously tight-lipped interviewee: in almost a quarter of a century of movie stardom, she has discussed anything remotely to do with her private life a grand total of zero times. She has played a blinder, because plenty of shiz has gone down that I’d totally forgotten about. I never think of her as a man-eater, for example, but on top of Cruise, she stealth-dated everyone from Matthew McConaughey to Puff Daddy (as was) and, reportedly, Matt Damon. For the past eight years, however, she has been happily settled in Madrid and LA with her outrageously handsome husband, Javier Bardem, the Oscar-winning Spanish actor and most-lusted-after thing to come out of the Canary Islands since... would you like to just go ahead and insert your own spicy chorizo gag here?
The mother of two is a sphinxy presence today, cosseted up in her megasuite. The temperature gauge has been turned up to old-people’s-home levels of boiling, so when she sits down, she shimmies off her coat to reveal a gold-flecked black blouse and the most beautiful skin I’ve ever seen on a human being. Actually, let’s get the “she’s stunning” bit out of the way now, too. I’ll just say that Cruz is even more extraordinary-looking in the flesh than she is on screen, and leave it at that, because otherwise it’s going to get a bit much.
She clearly takes this Lancôme ambassadress stuff seriously. She’s straight into Ferrero Rocher mode. “I am a fan of the brand since I was a little girl, when my mother had a beauty salon,” she says. (Cruz grew up in Madrid in the 1970s and 1980s.) She thinks it’s great that she gets to work with Peter Lindbergh, shooting her own fragrance campaigns.
Meanwhile, she is still in cinemas, making boob jokes in Zoolander 2, in which she plays a swimwear model turned sexy cop who recruits Derek to investigate a spate of pop-star murders: all the victims pulled a Blue Steel look in their final moments. She is also playing the villain in Sacha Baron Cohen’s new comedy action movie, Grimsby. The reviews haven’t all been great, but the Sony hack in 2014 revealed emails suggesting Cruz was offered $400,000 to be in it, and she says: “I had a great time with Sacha, because he’s hilarious.” How do you find the promotional/red carpet thing? Stressful? Boring? “It can be intense,” she says, “but I’ve done this since I was 15, so it’s part of my job and I’m happy to do it.” Quite. Five films with Almodovar, two with Allen, a Pirates of the Caribbean blockbuster and a series of English-language hairspray ads where I could not understand a word she was saying — she’s done it all. And won an Oscar, to boot.
She will shoot The Queen of Spain next, then Escobar, playing Virginia Vallejo, the drug lord’s mistress, opposite Bardem in the title role. Oftentimes, she simply plays the title role of mummy in her own life to son Leo, 5, and daughter Luna, 2. “I love my country and my city, Madrid, and spending time there. All my best friends are there, my family,” she says. “Even when I’ve been living in LA or New York, it has always felt like my home.”
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She’s fiercely loyal, and has had the same agent since she was 15, and the same hairdresser, Pablo, for 20 years. She takes no credit for being a glamourpuss. When people congratulate her on “slaying” the red carpet, she simply says: “Pablo did it. And Versace made the dress.”
Grimsby is in cinemas now. Penelope Cruz is ambassadress of Lancôme Grandiose Mascara