The reason why Eva Mendes was “ready to quit acting”
Long before she actively stepped away from the industry, Eva Mendes was prepared to give up acting altogether after becoming disenchanted with the way her film career had failed to take off how she’d imagined.
The actor hasn’t appeared in a movie since 2014’s Lost River, the fantasy thriller that doubled as the feature-length directorial debut of Ryan Gosling, who also wrote the screenplay. Before that, her previous outing had come in The Place Beyond the Pines two years previously, where Mendes was first introduced to the man she’d eventually marry and have two daughters with.
After beginning her career in straight-to-video horror sequel Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, Mendes would notch several largely forgettable credits before being cast in Training Day as Sara, the mistress of Denzel Washington’s Alonzo Harris. From there, big things were on the horizon, but prior to landing a spot in the ensemble, she was ready to give it all up.
Mendes reflected on that period as one of missed opportunity in an interview with Cinema Blend, which proved to be such a taxing experience that she considered walking away from her dreams of silver screen stardom altogether.
“I did a small role in Training Day that was amazing for me, and really pivotal in my career. I was ready to quit acting. I was so bored, I was doing terrible cheesy horrible films and I was like what am I doing? Then I got to work with Denzel, and then it just happened,” she said. “I was like, this is why I do this, for this connection, and to work opposite Denzel Washington. That really sparked me and ignited me.”
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror most definitely ticks the box marked “terrible cheesy horrible”, and that applies to the majority of her pre-Training Day filmography. She played a bridesmaid in the moderately successful but critically-reviled A Night at the Roxbury, the movie-length expansion of the Saturday Night Live sketch ‘The Roxbury Guys’.
Children’s adventure comedy My Brother the Pig, unmemorable slasher sequel Urban Legends: Final Cut, and Steven Seagal actioner Exit Wounds rounded out her list of credits before sharing the screen with Washington on incendiary Oscar-winning form, so it’s completely fair that Mendes assumed she could potentially end up stuck as a jobbing actor in B-tier productions for the rest of her days.
That wasn’t something she was interested in, though, but if it wasn’t for Training Day, then she could have vacated stage left from cinema a lot earlier than intended. Instead, she embarked on a respectable career that saw more suitable offers begin flooding in from almost the second Antoine Fuqua’s intense street-level crime drama hit cinemas.
