Penélope Cruz has never been an actress who keeps her convictions off screen. At the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, she made clear she has no intention of starting now.
At the press conference for La bola Negra, PAGEONE Media correspondent Arne Gershwin Gogo asked Cruz why stories centering on LGBTQ+ experiences have become such a consistent presence throughout her career.
Her answer came without hesitation.
“I have a very strong reaction towards anything that doesn’t seem fair,” she said. “When I see people struggling, fighting for rights that should be — like — never questionable, that creates a very, very strong reaction in me that I need to put somewhere. And fortunately, I’ve been able to put it in the films that I do, through my characters.”
It is a characteristically direct answer from one of Spanish cinema’s most recognized figures — an actress whose work has long operated at the intersection of passion and principle.
Cruz credited much of that formation to Pedro Almodóvar, the filmmaker with whom she has built one of the most enduring director-actress relationships in contemporary cinema. She has appeared in seven of his films and says she hopes to make many more.
“He’s done so much good in that direction,” she said. “He’s been my master in many ways.”
The admiration, she revealed, goes back to childhood. Growing up in Spain, a young Cruz would watch Almodóvar’s interviews and arrive at a conclusion that still reads as both earnest and telling.
“I remember being really, like, 12 or 13 thinking — but why is he not our president? Because he’s the kind of person that we need right now.”
It is a memory that captures something essential about Cruz’s relationship to her craft: that for her, cinema has never been purely aesthetic. It has always carried the weight of something larger — a sense of justice, a demand for fairness, and a belief that the right story, told by the right person, can do what politics sometimes cannot.
“I think that’s something that we share,” she said of the love and admiration for Almodóvar. “Beyond being a genius director.”
La bola Negra screens as part of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. For Cruz, whose career has now spanned decades and continents, the Croisette remains familiar ground — but the conviction she brought to that press conference table felt anything but routine. If her words were any indication, she is still that 12-year-old in Spain, watching someone speak the truth on a screen, and deciding that it matters.