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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.
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EXCLUSIVE: Kylie Jenner is set to headline and executive produce Bachelorette Weekend (working title), a thriller drama, which is finalizing a deal for a straight-to-series order at Hulu, Deadline has learned.
This marks the first major role for Jenner who is following the career trajectory of older sister Kim Kardashian, a social media and reality star and business mogul branching out into acting and producing.
Kardashian is executive producing Bachelorette Weekend alongside Jenner. The project, created by author/screenwriter Lauren Oliver, comes from Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment.
In the series, a bachelorette weekend turns deadly when the bride (Jenner) winds up murdered in the pool, and her closest girlfriends all become suspects. Jenner’s role is described as the North Star of the series, which pieces together the events that led to the murder.
Jenner, Kardashian and Oliver executive produce with Aaron Kaplan; Jaiden Kaplan co-executive produces. Kapital Entertainment is the co-studio alongside 20th Television.
A rep for Hulu declined comment.
Bachelorette Weekend is based on an unpublished book by Flora Collins which was developed by Oliver’s IP packaging company StoryGiants. The TV adaptation, written by Oliver, was developed internally at Kapital by Aaron Kaplan and Jaiden Kaplan.
The spec script was sent to Kardashian to produce. She felt it was a great starring vehicle for Jenner and passed it onto her with both quickly coming on board. Through Kardashian’s first-look deal at 20th Television, Bachelorette Weekend was pitched to sibling Hulu, which bought it preemptively. After some back-and-fourth, the Disney streamer took it off the market with a straight-to-series order, which is still being negotiated.
Jenner telegraphed her interest into acting with her buzzy cameo in the Charli XCX’s A24 movie The Moment; she has been a fixture in the movie circles over the past couple of years, attending major events with her partner Timothée Chalamet. Like the rest of the Kardashian-Jenner clan, including Kim, Jenner is a star and executive producer on the hit Hulu reality series The Kardashians, which returns for Season 8 on Oct. 8.
Kardashian is the star and executive producer of her own scripted series on Hulu, legal drama All’s Fair. She also headlines and produces the upcoming Netflix movie The Fifth Wheel and executive produces the upcoming Netflix YA drama series Calabasas and the unscripted series Teen Moms: Baseball, which just premiered on Paramount+.
Bachelorette Weekend expands Kapital’s slate at Hulu where the company also has in the works drama series You Deserve To Know, starring The Vampire Diaries duo of Nina Dobrev and Paul Wesley, and What Remains, starring Kerry Washington. This marks the second green light for Jaiden Kaplan who also conceived and produced Kapital’s two One Mile streaming movies starring Ryan Phillippe, which are currently topping the Paramount+ daily chart at No.1 and No. 2.
Oliver’s previous works include multiple bestselling YA novels, including Before I Fall, the Delirium trilogy and Panic, which she later adapted into the streaming TV show on Amazon Prime of the same name. She is the author of psychological thrillers The Girl in the Lake and The Sleepwalker (June 2027) which is in feature development at Amazon/MGM, with Lauren adapting and with Scarlett Johanssen and Scott Stuber attached as executive producers. The first book in Oliver’s debut cozy mystery series The Die Hards will be published under her pseudonym Oliva Lawrence by Minotaur in Fall 2027.
Jenner and Kardashian are repped by WME. Oliver is repped by Verve and Jamie Feldman.
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EXCLUSIVE: The new Warner Bros’ Christian Parkes-led contemporary film label, Clockwork, which we first told you about last December, will be making the segue to the new Paramount Warner Bros merger aka Skydance.
Clockwork was on an internal list of Warner Bros labels shown in-house at Paramount. In addition, we’ve heard from reliable sources that all Warner Bros’ label heads (i.e. James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC, Richard Brener at New Line, etc) will stay in charge of their domains at the new conglomerate. As previously reported, all film label heads roll up and report to Paramount Pictures Co-Chairs, Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein.
Clockwork’s first theatrical release is on Oct. 16, the unearthed spicy Catholic taboo 1971 Ken Russell directed The Devils which will be screened in a 4K restoration. The whole idea why former Warner Bros Motion Picture Bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy launched the label with former NEON Chief Marketing Officer Parkes was to give the studio some A24-like mojo a shot in the arm. Clockwork is an entry point for edgy filmmakers with moderate sized budgeted pics. The label’s original output was for two-to-three films annually.
Clockwork, we understand, will co-exist with Paramount’s current global acquisition division and Republic Pictures, led by Wicker producer Lia Buman. That Melrose lot department made a big purchase out of Cannes with Canal’s Midnight Library for $36M (which includes domestic and a bulk of foreign). In addition, Republic Pictures is the label responsible for the 2024 Oscar nominated Munich Olympics thriller, September 5.
Projects coming into Paramount from Clockwork include the next movie from Anora Oscar winner Sean Bailey, Ti Amo! (financed by FilmNation). There’s also Clockwork’s mid-teen millions North American pick-up out of the Cannes market, Park Chan-Wook’s western The Brigands of Rattlecreek starring Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Chinese star Tang Wei (Decision to Leave). Also in the Clockwork portfolio is the Sean Penn directed feature about the January 6th Capitol riots.
Paramount didn’t return request for comment.
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Jeffrey Archer, the prolific British author and former politician, has died at the age of 86.
Archer’s publisher HarperCollins confirmed his death in a statement, revealing that the Kane & Abel writer died “suddenly and peacefully at home” on Monday. A cause of death was not disclosed.
Archer, a former Conservative member of parliament, sold more than 300 million books during a writing career that spanned five decades.
HarperCollins claims that Lord Archer is the only author ever to have been a #1 bestseller in fiction, short stories, and non-fiction
Archer’s work was adapted for the screen on many occasions, including the 1985 CBS miniseries based on Kane & Abel, which starred Peter Strauss as Abel Rosnovski and Sam Neill as William Lowell Kane.
ITV adapted First Among Equals in 1986, starring Jeremy Child, James Faulkner, David Robb, Tom Wilkinson, while Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was adapted by the BBC in 1990.
His political career, which included a spell as the Conservative Party’s deputy chairman, was interrupted by a four-year spell in prison in 2001 after he was found guilty of lying and cheating in a 1987 libel case against The Daily Star newspaper.
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