“I was crying”: The seedy audition that almost turned Penélope Cruz against Hollywood
Hollywood is a strange place. It’s no secret that it’s an industry laden with corruption and deception, especially targeted towards young women.
When Penélope Cruz was starting out, attempting to break into the industry beyond her native Spain, she found herself subject to uncomfortable demands which should’ve been mapped out plainly, and it almost put her off Hollywood completely.
Her career began in her home country, where she made her debut alongside her future husband Javier Bardem in Jamón jamón. Over the next few years, she appeared exclusively in Spanish films until she started to attract the attention of American producers. By 1998, she’d landed a few roles in Hollywood films, like the western The Hi-Lo Country by Stephen Frears, and of course, she soon appeared in Blow.
Yet, when an opportunity came by that could’ve seen her launch straight into a leading Hollywood role, she excitedly prepared to fly over to audition, studying English so that she could become skilled enough to land her first non-Spanish-speaking role. Talking to the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, she revealed that it was an “amazing” offer, but she wasn’t going to take it once she found out the extra demands she wasn’t privy to at first.
“When I get there, completely jet-lagged… they say, ‘Oh, we have to see you in the office.’ They wanted to add something to [my contract],” she explained. “They said, ‘If you want to do the screen test, you have to accept that there are going to be some naked scenes that were not in the script.’” Those dreaded words hit Cruz like a truck. Why wouldn’t that have been negotiated before she flew over to America?
Cruz had done nude scenes before, but it wasn’t something she’d had the greatest experience with. When shooting her first film when she was just 18, she agreed to do a nude scene (opposite Bardem, no less), but she found it rather intimidating. “Everyone was really respectful, aware of the fact that I was 18. I remember the last day of filming; I was crying, saying, ‘What if I never shoot a movie again?’ The feeling was devastating. ‘Who knows when I will see these people again?’ Including Javier,” she once said.
So, the prospect of another nude scene was rather daunting, and she was understandably frustrated that this hadn’t been communicated beforehand. In her SAG-AFTRA interview, she emphasised how reluctant she was to yield to these Hollywood demands, “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me 24 hours ago, before I got on the plane?’ Even if I did movies before that had [nude] scenes… at that time, I didn’t want to go through that.”
Cruz wasn’t going to put herself in an awkward situation to break into Hollywood, and she trusted what her instinct was telling her to do. She had to turn the part down and wait for the right role to come along instead. “I felt like, for a few years, I’m just going to say no to whatever, when my heart is telling me no.”
She agreed to do the screen test anyway, but she knew that she risked damaging her reputation for being “too difficult”.
Cruz didn’t care. “The director stopped talking to me, he left the room, he was furious. I called the heads of the studio. I didn’t speak English, but in that meeting, I spoke English. I said, ‘If you think you can treat people like this… with me, it’s not going to work.”
After everything, she walked away feeling “proud,” adding, “In that moment I felt, ‘The day that I die, I will remember this moment.’” Luckily, Cruz found a place for herself in Hollywood, and she made sure she did it without giving in to the demands of those who thought they could deceive her.
