Spanish Oscar winner Penelope Cruz said Wednesday that putting a firewall between acting and her private life—even when working with husband Javier Bardem—had put a stop to the “torture” of her early years in the industry.
Presenting her new film Everybody Knows by Iran’s Asghar Farhadi at Cannes, Cruz told reporters that she and Bardem made a point of not taking their personal life to the set, or their work home with them.
“When I was in my 20s, I thought the more I would torture myself and the more I would stay in character for months, the better the result would be,” Cruz said.
“We (she and Bardem) have very similar ways to work and maybe I did that experiment when I was younger because we both started very young.”
Cruz and Bardem, who many celebrity watchers say have claimed the place vacated by Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt in the star couple firmament, met on the set of the sexy 1992 Spanish dramedy Jamon Jamon when she was still a teenager.
But it took working together on Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which premiered at Cannes in 2008, to light the romantic spark.
Cruz took home an Academy Award for her supporting role as a hot-tempered artist in the film. She and Bardem, who won the previous year for No Country for Old Men, are respectively the first Spanish man and woman to win an acting Oscar.