Penélope Cruz: ‘If I imagined fighting for an Oscar again, I’d be crazy’

By Alicia G. Arribas

Madrid, Oct 4 (EFE) – Penelope Cruz, three-time Oscar nominee and winner of a Volpi Cup, Venice Film Festival’s highest recognition, doesn’t think her latest role in “Parallel Mothers” could nominate her for another Hollywood statuette: “If I imagined it (being nominated again), I’d be crazy,” she told Efe in an exclusive interview.

“The three times it has happened it has been a surprise and a great joy, I still can’t believe it and I don’t expect it to happen to me again, but if it ever happens again I will experience it as if it were the first time, but I don’t expect anything,” Cruz tells Efe ahead of the premiere Friday of the latest film by Pedro Almodovar.

The actress has been Almodóvar’s muse since she first worked with him in “Carne trémula” in 1997.

In 2006, Cruz’s role in Almodóvar’s “Volver” nominated her for an Oscar, but it was not until her second nomination in 2008 that she won an Oscar for her role in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”.

“The good thing about this profession is that you don’t get to a place where you say ‘it’s all done, I already know everything I had to know,’” she says.

“All the actors in their 80s and 80-somethings I know will tell you the same thing: they still have the same passion for their work, with the desire to keep exploring, to keep doing, to keep learning. That is what this job gives us, that you face a new character every time. And you are like a student, always starting from scratch,” she says.

Her latest role of Janis in “Parallel Mothers”, a professional photographer raised by her grandmother who is determined to find the remains of her great-grandfather who was shot and buried in a ditch during the Spanish Civil War, has won the actress a Volpi Cup.

“Pedro gives me such interesting characters, so difficult and full of nuances, and he guides me and accompanies me in the creation process,” she says.

Cruz said she prepared for the role for four months.