Eva Mendes: 'I don't care about looking beautiful'
In her new film, The Place Beyond the Pines, she ditches glam, playing a hard-grafting waitress opposite real-life partner Ryan Gosling. She talks about how the role mirrors her upbringing and, er, why her dog's face should be pixellated
"If you see Mike Leigh," says Eva Mendes, "tell him Mendes really wants him. And I do a good cockney." So I did. Or, rather, I emailed his agent. Mendes had already done the heavy lifting. "I sent him a note maybe like eight years ago," she says, a little giddy, "and I'm sure he had no idea who I was. And then I ran into him and he was lovely. So I just hope these last eight years I've maybe done something that he's liked or could see potential in, so we could possibly work together." His films are magical, she says; they move her to tears. "I come from a very Cuban family and for some reason his family dynamics, although not similar, are so familiar to me."
Leigh has been known to read the Guardian, I say. She sounds ecstatic. "Maybe you can work it into your article somehow!" To meet Mendes, it turns out, is to root for her, to be smoothly recruited on to her team. Together, maybe, just maybe, you can make this thing happen.
A few days later, the agent writes back. Leigh is in pre-production on his new film and completely unavailable to deal with this. For Mendes, it will not be a shock. Nor for me. For there is a reason that she is unlikely to be first choice to play Jim Broadbent's long-lost daughter, or Timothy Spall's fag-ash pal, always up for sinking a pint somewhere off the North Circular. And she knows it. "Somehow …" she says, hesitantly, "well, I've been told, anyway ... Some people have said that my image is a bit glamorous."
She may be on to something there. Mendes – Ask Men's No 1 2009, People's Most Beautiful At Any Age 2012 – is a bit glamorous. Up close she is so striking you feel as if you are rubbernecking: skin silky, face radiant and lynx-like, lethal cheekbones, rollercoaster curves.
She has fronted ads for Cartier, Revlon, Morgan, Cocio, Campari, Thierry Mugler's Angel fragrance and Calvin Klein's Seductive Comfort lingerie. She has been a spokeswoman for Pantene, Reebok Easytone trainers and Australia's 30 Days of Fashion & Beauty. In 2009 she was named Magnum Ice Cream's Global Pleasure Ambassador (one for the passport, that) with a remit that included liaising with the firm's professor of pleasure and hosting a pleasure summit in Istanbul. It was here that she divulged that chocolate, hard work and three massages a week do it for her. (The professor's findings revealed that men are better-skilled at extracting enjoyment from life, as they have an average PQ – that's "pleasure quotient" - score of 120 as opposed to 116 for women. Suck on that, Tiresias.)
Mendes is, then, no stranger to the billboard. But lately the campaigns have changed – fewer of them, with a different emphasis (basically: easy on the cleavage). The only one she has done this year is for Vogue spectacles.
The reason is Leigh – or, at least, Leigh-alikes; Mendes also has Pedro Almodóvar and David Lynch in her crosshairs. Some time in 2009, after shooting Frank Miller's vampy noir The Spirit (on which she had "a fine time"), she made a conscious choice. No more duff sequels. No more superfluous sultry. No more plain predictability. No more colons (she has done Mortal Kombat: Conquest, Urban Legends: Final Cut; her debut was Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror).
"I just made a decision. I said: 'I am not working with the Mike Leighs of this world and I want to.' When it comes to being an actress I actually really love coming from a very raw place. Any opportunity I get to not wear makeup on set, I take. I really don't care about looking beautiful in a film unless I have to for the character. I don't check playback, I don't even know anything about lighting. I love anything that gets me closer to the role. So I needed to turn down those things that could possibly pigeonhole me."
In fact, Mendes is being a little tough on a CV that includes Training Day, Hitch and We Own the Night. Still, her strategy worked. Her first film post The Spirit was Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant. Then came The Other Guys (in which Mendes successfully spoofed her own sex appeal) and the adultery drama Last Night. Over the past year she has been in one of the most acclaimed films of the decade (Leos Carax's Holy Motors), a credible Mexican indie (Girl in Progress) and the new movie from the team behind Blue Valentine, The Place Beyond the Pines.
In it, she plays Romina, a hard-grafting waitress who becomes pregnant after a fling with Ryan Gosling's bleach-blond, bad-tatted stunt motorcyclist for a travelling circus. When he returns to town the following year, he realises he has a baby son and decides to stick around. This does not go well.
It is a film preoccupied with paternal legacy – both for Gosling and for a local cop, played by Bradley Cooper, who has a son of the same age. The maternal influence is muted, but Mendes is scrubbily committed to, and convincing in, the part. She felt such kinship with the character that she told director Derek Cianfrance that an audition would not be appropriate: "I just said: hey, I would love to drive you around and talk about Romina and show you where I grew up and draw the parallels there. I think that would probably best serve the character at this point."
Both she and Romina, she thinks, are products of their environment – the children of a single mother, raised in relative poverty. To be first-generation American is "a great privilege but it also comes with a lot of responsibilities. You really don't have an excuse. Your parents most likely fought to get there and did it for you. You see Romina struggling to make the best life for her and her child. She's trying to make all the right decisions in a world that's a little, y'know, un-nuturing."
Cianfrance placed such faith in Mendes that he asked her to cast her on screen mother. The woman she went for (now "Mommy #2" on her mobile) was the one who most resembled the real-life version. In what way? "Integrity. She had such a strong moral compass, but wasn't preachy. She just commanded respect in the real sense. And she didn't put on any airs but was definitely a woman who you just sat up a little straighter when she was around."
Pines is a movie with a pronounced moral backbone. It is oddly concerned with etiquette – Gosling's character (like his white knight in Drive) finds guns vulgar, considers condescension distasteful, suspects it would have been "common courtesy" to let him know he had a son. Such a code of conduct chimes with Mendes, about whom there is something peculiarly vintage – not just her home decor line (available exclusively at Macy's), or her forthcoming clothes collection. She seems like a star from a different era – a Sophia Loren, rather than a Cameron Diaz; already mature when she was 30 (she is now 39).
She spends a lot of time with her mother – "She's 70, a real fun age; every day there's a new pain and she laughs at it" – and it's to spare her feelings, says Mendes, that she won't speak of her 2008 stint in rehab. Her relationship with Gosling is off-limits, also, as was an eight-year stretch with her previous boyfriend. Mendes – who nursed a childhood dream to be a nun – is a pinup perennial without tabloid baggage. She applauds the practice of pixelating the faces of celebrities' children and thinks the policy should be rolled out to their dogs, as she gets unnerved when strangers know the name of her Belgian shepherd, Hugo. (It is possible they are clocking her and then joining the dots, rather than actually recognising the dog from a photo.)
Most of all, she is scrupulously polite, friendly almost to a fault. When I first met her in Toronto, following Pines' premiere, it was alongside some other reporters, one of whom kicked things off with an appreciation of the outfit (demin hotpants, micro vest) she wears in her first scene with the returned Gosling. Mendes was, he felt, with hubba-hubba emphasis, "letting him know what he'd left behind".
If she found that creepy, she didn't say so. Rather, she clutched the man's elbow and said: "That's interesting you say that! God I love you. I made a choice that was quite the opposite of that. I lost a lot of weight for it; like 15lb. I wanted it to feel like this baby had depleted her. Like he had sucked the life out of her; I saw her as very kind of unsexy and unflattering in that outfit. A little pathetic. I wanted to make her haggard." She laughs. "Please tell me I looked like shit."
