Penélope Cruz Says It's a 'Beautiful Thing' to Turn 50: 'It's a Reason to Have a Party'
Penélope Cruz is entering her fifth decade in just a few short months, but she's not fearful — in fact, it's quite the opposite!
“But you know why I don’t worry about that?” the 49-year-old actress told Elle in a new interview. “Because people have been asking me about age since I was twentysomething. I was more bothered then than now. Now it makes more sense, to discuss turning 50. It’s a huge, beautiful thing, and I really want to celebrate that with all my friends. It means I’m here and I’m healthy, and it’s a reason to have a party. But when I was 25, they would ask me these psychotic questions, things you would not believe, and the only weapon I would have was not to answer. Even now, on the red carpet, when they shout to ‘Turn around,’ I always pretend I didn’t hear what they said.”
The actress shares two kids with husband Javier Bardem.
The brunette beauty, who shares Luna, 10, and Leo, 12, with husband Javier Bardem, also revealed some of her parenting tactics, which includes making sure they are kept out of the spotlight for now.
“It’s for them to decide if they are going to have a job that is more exposed to the public or not. They can talk about that when they’re ready," she said when asked if they will follow in their pair's footsteps.
Penélope Cruz admitted she doesn't let her kids have social media accounts.
Cruz's children don't have social media accounts, but they also “don’t even have phones. It’s so easy to be manipulated, especially if you have a brain that is still forming. And who pays the price? Not us, not our generation, who, maybe at 25, learned how a BlackBerry worked. It’s a cruel experiment on children, on teenagers.”
Penélope Cruz also spoke about how she tends to play mothers at this point in her career.
Cruz, who stars in Ferrari, also touched upon her successful acting career, admitting "sometimes [the characters I play] can be uncomfortable and painful. It’s hard to let them go, but at the end, I always feel they made me a little bit more compassionate than I was two months ago. And with the safety net that you know this is not your reality. It creates less judging and more compassion in every area of my life.”
Now, “at my age, 80 percent of the characters that I play will be about motherhood or divorce or abandonment or characters who didn’t want to have children or couldn’t or who lost children. I’ve played mothers since I was very young," she continued. “Pedro [Almodóvar] always saw me as a mother.”
Penélope Cruz stars in 'Ferrari.'
“We have known each other since I was 17. He would watch me going to talk to strangers just to see their babies. He always saw that strong, inevitable instinct in me, and I saw him see it. But also, ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted kids. But I knew I wanted them older. I wanted to wait until I felt I was ready. I was sure it would be the most important thing I would do in my life," she concluded.