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| Penelope Cruz at the North American premiere of Volver in Toronto on Friday. (Reuters) |
Toronto, Sept. 9 (AFP): Director Pedro Almodovar said at the North American premiere of Volver he hoped Penelope Cruz becomes the first Spanish-speaking actress with a “fake bottom” to win an Oscar.
“I pray every night for Penelope to be nominated (for an Oscar),” the Spanish filmmaker said at the Toronto International Film Festival. “She deserves a nomination.” For the role of Raimunda, a mother with a teenage daughter (Yohana Cobo) and a deadbeat husband, struggling to keep her family afloat by working several jobs, Cruz had to wear an bottom prosthetic “to give her more volume”, Almodovar said.
“I wanted the fake bottom of Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie,” he quipped, acknowledging Cruz’s slender physique. “Having a more generous ass made her look more down-to-earth.”
The comical drama about mothers and daughters, adultery and incest, murder and cover-ups explores what binds three generations of women of one quirky family together, including the ghost of the grandmother, played by Carmen Maura in her first collaboration with Almodovar in 17 years.
In the film, Cruz tells a neighbour who interrupts her as she tries to quietly dispose of a corpse that blood on her neck is just a stain from menstruation or a “woman problem”, a spectacular line to hide her deceit and summarise much of the action. Almodovar, 56, won an Oscar for best foreign film in 2000 for All About My Mother and in 2003 won the best original screenplay Oscar for Talk To Her.