Eva Mendes is a man-eater, in the nicest possible way. The 31-year-old
Cuban-American actress, cover girl and co-star of the comic book action fest
Ghost Rider has a daunting reputation for transforming the most
insightful of male interviewers into puddles of fawning inarticulacy.
Recently voted the World’s Sexiest Woman (by Esquire
magazine), Mendes specialises in neutering Men’s Mag journalists with a
single flicker of her deep and dark Latin eyes.
I, however, am different. I work for a newspaper. I have studied film in
college. And I know philosophy. In other words, I have the power, and in my
hands this Mendes woman will be putty!
The first sign that I’m in trouble comes a mere ten minutes into the
interview. We’ve already done Ghost Rider. The movie, about a
biker, played by Nicolas Cage, who turns into a flaming midnight avenger,
has been critically panned but is nonetheless a box-office sensation in the
US; it has taken nearly $80 million in ten days, which ought to catapult
Mendes into the Hollywood Alist. She plays Cage’s childhood sweetheart
Roxanne, and is certainly the best, most human thing in the film. She says
that, despite everything, the movie is visual art, and she is proud that she
can give an audience two hours of entertaining distraction from the modern
world, which is so awful right now.
She flops back into the couch of our Central London hotel suite and exhales a
long exhausted jet of cigarette smoke. She is wearing a snug-fitting
turquoise dress and brown boots. She is waiting, languorously, for the next
question.
So, I say, aiming for levity, V.I.P. – what was that all about? V.I.P.
was, of course, a hairbrained TV show from 1998, and a camp vehicle for post-Bay-watch
Pamela Anderson. It was about bodyguards and celebrities, and Mendes,
then a fledgeling actress, had a bit part.
She hoots at the very mention of the title. “Oh,” she says, shaking her head
and fixing me with her best World’s Sexiest Woman stare. “I love you.” She
means that she finds the question quirky and irreverent, but the words still
have the desired effect — namely a slight trembling of the hands and a
tightening of the throat.
She talks some more about the early career days. About growing up in the
working-class Silver Lake neighbourhood of LA, and about getting her big
break in the Aerosmith video Hole in My Soul (in a parody of the
movie Weird Science, Mendes is created in a computer lab as,
appropriately enough, the ultimate male fantasy). She says that even now,
after a lead romantic role in the Will Smith smash Hitch, and some
stand-out smaller parts in films such as Training Day and Trust
the Man, she still has to fight for the roles that require more than
just a voluptuous Latin clotheshorse. “I can play it up, and I can play it
down,” she explains, grinning, and giving her hips a little seated shimmy.
“You know, 15lb less and I’m not as va-va-voom. But it’s a battle every day.
I’m constantly making those calls and writing those letters to the Mike
Leighs and the Spike Jonzes of the world, asking them at least to consider
me.”
She remembers, giggling, that she even sent a letter to Mike Judge, the
director of the quirky white-collar comedy Office Space, promising
to cut off her, ahem, left breast if he’d consider her for his next film.
Worryingly, her breasts start entering the conversation at an all too
frequent rate. She admits that she is a voluptuous woman, in the vein of
Sophia Loren, and proud. We then talk about her pivotal Training Day
role, opposite Denzel Washington, where she appeared entirely naked on
screen. I tell her, truthfully, that I don’t remember the nude scene. She
says that that’s an insult. I say, half-heartedly, that I’d prefer to ignore
her body and know that she was firstly an interesting person.
“But one with a great rack!” she counters.
I ask, perspiring slightly, if we can leave her “rack” out of this.
“Are you crazy?” she asks, taking mock umbrage. “Why?”
I ignore the question, but am suffering slightly and can’t think of a quick
enough quip.
She tells me, filling in the silence, that I am cute, and that I am adorable.
In the same way that you might address a cocker spaniel that has just soiled
its own basket. I tell her, unsure of where to look, that she is simply
flattering the journalist. “No!” she says. “You can eavesdrop on my other
interviews! They haven’t gone like this.” She then leans forward on the
couch, fixes her most potent World’s Sexiest Woman stare yet, and says
slowly and deliberately: “I get your whole thing. And I think you’re cute.”
It’s official. I am putty. The rest of the interview is a disaster. Mendes has
complete control. She asks most of the questions. She wants to know where I
live, if I’m hung-over, and if I like pregnant women. At one point she asks
me to turn off the tape recorder so we can discuss a sexual practice that’s
too indecent for the ears of the mass media. I try to sound suave and tell
her that I’d heard of it before, possibly even done it, but she’s not buying
it.
Occasionally I muster up the strength, from deep within my putty puddle, to
wrestle back ineffectual control of the interview. During these brief
moments I counter, slightly embarrassed, and imply that a lot of her early
roles were vacuous, and that some of her anecdotes are boring. She deflects
this with effortless aplomb and tells me about the time, after Training
Day, when she carried a knife in her purse because of the amount of
unwanted male attention she was receiving. Or the time when she came to
collect her Mom in a limousine for the premiere of 2 Fast 2 Furiousand
her mother burst out crying. She describes her life now, living next to the
Hollywood sign, going for hikes in the hills and listening to the best of
Oasis, Morrissey and the Smiths on her iPod.
She says, finally, that I will be impressed by her next movie, We Own The
Night — a New York mobster flick co-starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark
Wahlberg. “You are going to love this film,” she says. “And you will be so
much more respectful to me the next time you see me.”
I groan. “You hate this job, don’t you?” she asks.
I tell her that I don’t. “But it’s a bit tedious for you, isn’t it?”
Again, slightly bamboozled and at a loss for words, I say no, and that I get
to meet lots of different people.
“No,” she says. “You get to give people s***, which is what you like.”
I tell her, genuinely upset now, that I think she’s being unfair.
“Well,” she says, thinking about it. “I think you’re adorable, and fun. And if
it was anyone else I’d have ended this interview a long time ago.”
And then she leaves. Another triumph for Mendes. Another humiliating defeat
for the male of the species.
Ghost Rider is out now; see review page 11
