Penelope Cruz as lena in Broken Embraces

The rumours of Penelope Cruz’s pregnancy had yet to surface when we met. It was the fag end of a day of endless interviews in an airless hotel room; she was sitting gloomily glued to a chair. It had been made clear that she would not discuss her personal life (meaning her relationship with the actor Javier Bardem), although she revealed that she was looking to change her life after coming close to health-sapping exhaustion through over-work. “I want something else,” she said more than once. “I may only make one film a year, other years none at all.”

The Special one

Cruz spoke engagingly and passionately, but also seemed some distance from the typically vivacious firework she plays in films such as Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar playing a vengeful, hilariously tempestuous basket-case) and Broken Embraces, Pedro Almodovar’s new movie about a woman, well, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

It is vintage, brilliant Almodovar. Cruz, 35, plays a woman desperate to be an actress who falls for a director. However, she also has a very jealous, twisted husband. Comedy is heaped on melodrama; comedy mixes toxically with tragedy. As in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz’s sexy, thrilling and unpredictable character dominates every scene that she is in as murder, intrigue, passion and betrayal — and the usual Almodovar tangle of high-pitched plot twists — swirl around her.

Almodovar has “probably been very curious about women’s psychology and feelings”, Cruz says, ever since growing up surrounded by women. He has said how smitten he is by Cruz (so what if he’s gay, her screen presence is alluring whatever your persuasion). “He is so special,” she says, genuinely, in her soft, precise Spanish accent. Her praise may sound gushy but it is considered. “He has a box of surprises. You can see it in his work, but he is like that every day — you never know what he is capable of saying, he could have changed a whole scene the night before and blow you away with an amazing idea. He’s always creating. He doesn’t stop himself. He is not afraid of judgment, yet doesn’t judge his characters. He’s very inspiring.”

Almodovar is obviously different from mainstream Hollywood directors. “He can produce his own movies,” Cruz notes. “He says, ‘I’m an artisan’, and it’s true. He has thousands of meetings with every department in the movie. His eye is amazing. He chooses everything in the frame.”

His big presence

Cruz grew up in Madrid. Her father was a mechanic, her mother a hairdresser; she has a younger brother and sister, with whom she has designed a clothing range for the fashion chain Mango. As a child she wanted to become a dancer; she devoted 15 years of her early life to it, “and then because of Pedro’s movies I changed my mind. I thought, ‘I want to be an actress, to meet this person and work with him. When I saw Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, it became almost an obsession. It made me feel so many things. I loved the way he saw the world. I thought, ‘I want that in my life, to be around that person, to understand more about the way he sees the world’.”

The two have been friends since Cruz was 17. “He called me because he had seen me in Jamon, Jamon. I could not believe he had called me. We met. I was so nervous. He was so cute and charming, smart and interesting. He was like how I imagined: charming, funny, intimidating — because he is a big presence. He said, ‘You are too young. I am looking for a 35-year-old woman but I will call you. I will find a character that will fit you like a glove’. And then he did, in Live Flesh.” She has also appeared in other Almodovar movies, including All About My Mother and Volver.

Penelope with pedro almodovar

She is mesmerising, he is moody

Do the two of them have an intense relationship? “Some people ask me that, because we are friends and I have known him for so many years, maybe I am more relaxed on set with him. It is the opposite, because he is someone very important in my life and career as an actress and because he has given me really great opportunities. So I never want to disappoint him. That would make me feel really sad.” Away from the set they have dinners, “take walks in different cities”, go to movies and the theatre. You imagine the loud and brash Almodovar to be great fun and the two of them to be mischievous; he loves dressing Cruz up in his films, making her love, making her lose, making her suffer and then dressing her up all over again. She is utterly mesmerising. Is he fun?

“It depends on the moment,” she says, smiling. “He can be very funny and very serious and he’s honest. When we are working, if he doesn’t like something he says so. If he likes it, he’s encouraging. Because you know you will hear the truth you can get nervous. But I’d rather have that than a director who says ‘It’s OK’ all the time, because I don’t believe that.”

Addictive and crazy

Every scene is beautifully mounted in Broken Embraces; it is a bewildering canvas of styles, switching from bubblegum-pink soap-opera set to startling, lunar-looking landscapes near the coast. “For him, it’s not like ‘Today we will shoot a big scene’,” Cruz says. “Everything is treated with the same intensity. That’s the way it should be, every day should feel like the first day of shooting, because even if you have been rehearsing for months like we do, it is still abstract until you start filming. I like this. It’s addictive too: everything is constantly changing, the energy of your fellow actors and director affects you. It’s very alive.”

Of course, you feel this in Cruz’s tense, fizzing performance. “There are days when you have to be like that the whole time and you end up in a strange state,” she says, looking down. “You can’t put your energies into something else if you have 10 minutes free or a lunch break. I sometimes wonder if it’s the best thing for your nervous system. Probably not. But you can’t stop life. It’s a little bit crazy, the nature of it.”

She is scaling back work. Her Oscar win was the fruition of years of constant work (her first taste of mainstream fame came when she co-starred alongside Tom Cruise, her boyfriend at the time, in Vanilla Sky in 2001). “It’s what I wanted to do. But now I feel differently. You get chronically tired. I don’t want to feel like that. Growing up, learning classical ballet is a very disciplined thing. A lot of my relationship to the world came from the years I danced. If your feet are bleeding you have to carry on dancing and smiling. You think it’s normal. Then you take that attitude to whatever your work is. It’s been an advantage in many ways, but I took it too far.”

Workaholic seeking happiness

For the past two years Cruz has created “a much better equilibrium between work and time for my life. I can rest, go travelling, have time to do nothing. Before I might take 15 days off in a year and try to leave my BlackBerry in my room to please my family.” Her parents begged her to slow down (perhaps remembering that their daughter had suffered a breakdown when she was 17), “but you must decide for yourself and go through things. The turning point was when I realised I was measuring the years going by according to whatever the films were I was working on, the countries I was shooting in. I was a total workaholic. I think that’s what I needed to do then. Now I can work, but I’m not on movie sets the whole year. I can say no until there is something I really need to do.”

Cruz has been learning to cook, to find “things important to happiness”, such as love maybe and, if the rumours are true, making babies. She demurs, though not demurely, to talk about her looks. “You get used to looking at yourself. I make sure I am a piece of clay and give whatever that character needs inside and outside. I have a physique that can change and transform. I am never concerned if I have to look bad. I don’t care if I look good. You do whatever is necessary to give the character what it needs. It’s important not to be selfish.”

Ageing? no, not again

She tries to eat well, exercise and hasn’t considered plastic surgery (she certainly doesn’t need to), “but I don’t know how I’ll feel in 20 years”. As for her thoughts on ageing, well this is when gloomy, tired Cruz gives way to something approaching the firework on screen. “They have been asking me that since I was 19,” she says, hackles up. “This question puts women at a disadvantage. Why don’t you ask actors the same question?”

I do, I reply truthfully.

“My way to contribute to win this battle is not to answer those questions,” she says forcefully. “I started making movies at 17. Why were they asking me that when I am a minor? If I don’t give an answer then it doesn’t become a big drama. It’s making a subject important when it shouldn’t be. You always end up reading stories about actresses... 80 per cent of them tell this story about being the ugly duckling in school. I think we have had enough of these stories.” She laughs, roars, actually. “I would probably say the same. We all feel that about ourselves, developing, becoming a woman. But if I read another story about an actress complaining about the way she looked in school ... Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha ... please not one again. And it’s never with men.” Yes it is, I say. “Really?” she says, scoffing, laughing. “Have you read Russell Crowe talking about how he looked in school growing up? I haven’t.”

Role call

Thank goodness, this is the kind of livewire Cruz of Vicky Cristina. “I was crying and screaming every single moment in that movie,” she says, shaking her head. “My character was going through big psychological torture. I was four weeks shooting and in that state the whole time.

“Woody is so funny, interesting and peculiar. He is very different to Pedro, but they are both unique and two of the most special people I know. You never know what Woody will say to you. He seems very shy at the beginning, but once he relaxes with you, and you relax with him, he says anything he wants. I wanted to write down every one of his lines, they were all like great Billy Wilder lines. Many I cannot repeat in an interview, sorry. I would love to work with him again.”

Cruz goes back to talking about her character in Broken Embraces. Like the film itself, she is many things other than her surface: a frustrated wife who wants to be an actress, an actress, an actress playing a role. The movie shifts from comedy to theatre, to drama, to drama-within-drama; reality to fantasy to thriller. Almodovar, Cruz says, “takes you through, like, ten changes”. And, just as her characters have run the gamut of smoky-eyed temptress through to sexually adventurous shrew, you sense that Cruz likes to keep her public identity a little unfixed. It will be no surprise, if she confirms it, if to the CV of ex-dancer and actress, she adds “mother-to-be”.