Cruz In Control

Penélope Cruz places family above all, from the roles she chooses to filming schedules. This month, she stars in the thriller Everybody Knows, which happens to also star her husband, Javier Bardem.

- Gaby Wood

Eleven years ago, I spent a couple of days in Madrid with Penélope Cruz. As part of the story I was writing, I accompanied her and her near-identical sister, Mónica, as they tried on designer swimsuits—an anecdote that led to more jealousy among my heterosexual male friends than any other I’ve told. Then we went to their childhood home in the working-class suburb Alcobendas, where they stood in the living room taking in the apartment’s proportions (much smaller than they’d remembered) and recalling the entire family doing housework in their underwear on Sundays with the stereo turned up loud. When I arranged to meet Cruz this time, the main reason I remembered that weekend was that back then, she had just returned from London, where she’d been to Rolling Stones and Prince concerts back-to-back, and the person she’d been there with was Javier Bardem. The actors had recently wrapped Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and there were rumors that—15 years after they shot their first steamy sex scenes together in 1992’s Jamón Jamón—they’d become a couple. Cruz insisted they were just friends, but there was a coy joy about her that was unmistakable.

Since then, of course, Cruz and Bardem have gotten married and had two children (Leo, eight, and Luna, five). They have each won an Academy Award, the only Spanish-born actors to have done so. They have made some of their best work in the intervening years, and on February 8, they release what may be their most rivetingly realistic performances, in Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows. Despite their relaxed, family-oriented life in Madrid and well-cultivated discretion, they are more like Spanish royalty than the actual royal family of Spain. It seems undeniable now that that summer was a turning point.