Penélope Cruz Awards Chatter Podcast Interview: The Invite, Bola Negra

Penélope Cruz, our guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at 1 Hotel Toronto, is the most celebrated Spanish film actress of all time and one of only a handful of Europeans who have become bona fide A-list stars in Hollywood.

Over the 34 years since her big screen debut in the Spanish film Jamon, Jamon (opposite Javier Bardem, who is now her husband), she has consistently done extraordinary work on both sides of the Atlantic, though she is probably best known for her seven collaborations with the great Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar: 1997’s Live Flesh, 1999’s All About My Mother, 2006’s Volver, 2009’s Broken Embraces, 2013’s I’m So Excited!, 2019’s Pain and Glory and 2021’s Parallel Mothers.

The only person who has won at least one acting award from each of the five most prominent European film academies, she has also starred in two films that won the best international feature Oscar (1992’s Belle Epoque and All About My Mother), became the first Spanish actress ever to be nominated for an acting Oscar (for Volver), subsequently received three additional acting Oscar noms (for 2008’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, 2009’s Nine and Parallel Mothers), and became, in 2009, the first — and, to this day, only — Spanish actress to win an acting Oscar (for Vicky Cristina Barcelona).

But never has Cruz had a single year quite like 2026, in which she has given three great performances: as a bohemian sexologist Olivia Wilde’s The Invite (A24); as a bawdy cabaret singer entertaining troops during the Spanish Civil War in Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s La Bola Negra (Netflix); and as a book editor enduring marital strife in Florian Zeller’s Bunker (Sony Classics).

During this episode, Cruz reflects on her path from her mother’s hair salon to her hero Almodóvar’s cinematic universe; the challenges of navigating a career across continents and languages; and her incredible 2026. Specifically, she discusses the unusually collaborative way in which Wilde and her Invite writers Rashida Jones and Will McCormack worked with their actors to construct the film’s script; the intense months of work that led up to her big musical number in La Bola Negra, and how her performance of it came in the midst of a health scare — and as a surprise to the hundreds of extras in the scene; what it was like reuniting on screen with Bardem in Bunker, a film that raises social issues important to both of them; plus more.