Eva Mendes

Interview By: Michael Dance
michaelmdance@gmail.com

Eva Mendes has shot to stardom fairly rapidly, even by today's Hollywood standards. After a few minor parts in movies like Urban Legends: Final Cut and Training Day, she scored the lead female role in 2 Fast 2 Furious. Her performance landed her roles like the cops in Out of TIme and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and then suddenly in 2005 she was playing opposite Will Smith in Hitch -- after having appeared as one of the girls in his "Miami" music video back in the late '90s.

After later forays into both the independent (Live!) and the mega-mainstream (Ghost Rider), she's now appearing in director James Gray's 1980s cops & criminals drama We Own the Night.

"I love The Yards," Mendes says of Gray's earlier movie, which like this one starred Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. "I really wanted to work with him, although I said no to him for a year. I loved his script, but it was too much of a girlfriend role. I was like, 'you know, I gotta tell you, I love this, but it's a little bit too victimy for me, I'm just kind of prancing around wearing cute clothes.' And he was so adamant, he said, 'I promise, I will make this better, and once you and Joaquin come in you can work on the characters,' and I said thanks but no thanks, you know'"

Luckily, Gray wasn't about to quit. "He came back to me a year later, and this dude, there's gotta be something special about him if he's pursuing me a year later. So I said yes, not reluctantly, but not totally convinced I was making the right choice. And now I've gotta tell you, hands down it's my favorite experience. My deepest experience in my acting career."

Mendes plays Amada, the girlfriend of Phoenix's club-host character Bobby. With Mendes's natural good looks and her energetic, Cuban-American persona, one might think she'd be a natural for the part, but "I'm not a club girl," she says. "I don't like clubs. [For research,] James took me to this club, it was straight back from the 1980s, with these musical numbers that I can't even describe. It was a hoot. I was around in the eighties but I was still young, thank God I wasn't doing the club scene at that age."

Diving into the world was an experience, especially through the lense of her character, who she calls "completely oblivious" to the less-than-legal operations that happen in the film's club. "She wouldn't think these people would actually kill people, no. And she's still kind of a Mama's girl, she was in this cloud, especially at the beginning. I didn't want to arm her with all this knowledge because the less she knew the better."

Mendes is happy to have the knowledge her character doesn't have. "There was an innocence to the partying back then. There wasn't knowledge of what these drugs were going to do to you, and there wasn't AIDS and stuff like that, there was an innocence to the drug intake. So I tried to give that a little bit to Amada as well. You know, now if we party, we know the consequences. We know what's going to happen, we know if we have unprotected sex what the possibilities are, so we're filled with all this knowledge, and now we've got to step up."

The most challenging scene in the movie for her was an early love scene between her and Phoenix -- or, more accurately, a masturbation scene, as someone bluntly says when asking her about it. "Thank you for reminding me that that was a masturbation scene," she says, laughing. "Most people just say love scene, but you just broke it down, thank you. That was nerve-racking, absolutely, but you know, you gott do it."

Was it embarrassing' "Well, I would say Children of the Corn 5 was more embarrassing, as a whole." (Ah, good point.) "I was so scared that morning, just really trying to stall, but you just go, 'I have to do this,' and James was really helpful. You usually always feel that ticking clock, when you're on the set, but that morning was just James and Joaquin and me for a couple of hours just talking, just letting me talk in circles and stalling and stuff. So eventually I just talked myself into an oblivion, and then we shot it.

Having proved herself as anyone but a stock character, Mendes is already expanding her career horizons -- to get her aforementioned independent movie Live! made, she became an exec-producer. "Producing for me is not like I'm looking to be the next Brian Grazer," she says. "It's more of, you know, when I read a script and there's a great female character in it, I'm like why isn't this being made' If I can help by attaching my name and making some calls and writing some letters, that's what producing is for me. It's not for an extra credit or anything. It's to get these stories told."

The downside, of course, is that sometimes that can't happen. "There's a couple of stories that I've just been dying to tell that I just can't get off the ground," she says, citing a TV show concept she tried to pitch but everyone passed on. "When I see shows like All in the Family, or Good Times, it's like, why don't we have any shows like that anymore' I was watching Good Times on Nick at Night the other night, and it was hysterical, of course, but it got so deep. They were talking about social/political issues and they were getting so deep, and it's like, where are those shows today' Right now [the TV networks] are all wanting the supernatural and that sort of thing, but where's the though-provoking stuff' Shows that are hysterical but are also talking about social/political things that are going on!" She leans back and laughs a little. "So that's my rant. I thought acting was hard; try producing and selling."