“I am an idiot”: Why Eva Mendes tried to turn down the biggest hit of her career
It must be brilliant living in a house with Ryan Gosling and Eva Mendes.
Apart from the fact that they both seem properly sound despite being bona fide Hollywood A-listers, they’re also richer than some entire countries, so if you ordered a takeaway, you could probably go large on everything, and they wouldn’t care. Plus, you could chat away to them about what it was like making films like Project Hail Mary or Training Day or The Notebook…actually, maybe not the last one.
We probably don’t need to say too much about Gosling, given he’s possibly the highest profile leading man in all of cinema these days, but Mendes doesn’t often get talked about as much as she should, which is partly a result of her own pretty selfless unofficial retirement from acting in order to raise her kids with her husband.
But prior to her last film, the Gosling-directed thriller Lost River in 2014, Mendes had two decades of appearing in some critically and commercially successful films, putting in some superb performances in 2010’s The Other Guys with Will Ferrell and hard-hitting dramas, including the film she met her future partner in, 2012’s The Place Beyond the Pines co-starring Bradley Cooper.
It was Denzel Washington’s Training Day that changed everything for Mendes however, the 2001 cop thriller that scooped a ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for Washington and that Mendes credits with rescuing her from a career spent doing what she called cheesy, horrible films, examples of which littered the late 1990s like Children of the Corn V and the appalling SNL spin-off A Night at the Roxbury.
The exposure Mendes got as a result of her role alongside Washington led to several box office hits at the start of the 2000s, including 2 Fast 2 Furious, the drag race franchise which at that point was still about who could drive a car quickest in a straight line rather than the ‘Statham vs The Rock vs Vin Diesel in outer space’ nonsense it became many years later, and the Farrelly brothers conjoined twin comedy Stuck on You with Matt Damon in 2003.
A couple of years later brought the chance to appear alongside another big Hollywood name in another comedy, this time a romantic one opposite Will Smith, who was probably the highest-paid and most in-demand actor in Hollywood at the time, called Hitch. But Mendes wasn’t entirely convinced as to whether or not taking part was a wise idea for her career.
She told Collider a few years later, “Actually, I said no to Hitch, and I was like, ‘I love Will, but I want to be a serious actress. I don’t want to do a romantic comedy’. I am an idiot, you know. And of course, meeting Will was like one of the highlights of my career.”
Taking the role on proved to be a wise choice, because Hitch, which told the story of Smith’s matchmaking expert trying and failing to woo Mendes’ gossip columnist, ended up being a massive global hit, bringing in $371million against a budget of just $55m, much of which probably went on Smith’s salary.
Much as the film brought Mendes more exposure, she didn’t get lucky with her next choices, as another comedy called Trust the Man with David Duchovny didn’t go down well, and her foray into superheroes, 2007’s Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage, was absolutely panned. The same thing happened with 2008’s The Women, and again with the Frank Miller comic book movie The Spirit later that year. She did, however, get a good amount of praise for her work on 2010’s romantic drama Last Night with Avatar’s Sam Worthington.
