Actress Eva Mendes, 34, went to rehab early this year for an apparent substance abuse problem. Not much came out about Eva’s issues and she had them treated kind of quietly and then emerged in plenty of topless and racy photoshoots, which definitely served to distract the public from whatever mild image fallout she may have otherwise suffered. Eva recently spoke to E! News’ Marc Malkin and told him that she’s in therapy and is open about it because she thinks there should be no shame in it. She also said that a lot her earlier problems stemmed from the inequalities in the world and her inability to accept that she was so rich and successful compared to most:

“I’m big on therapy,” Mendes told me yesterday. “I’ve always said I love talking about therapy, because there’s nothing wrong with it. Why wait until something goes terrible in your life to start fixing things?”

Mendes, 34, has never talked details about why she did a stint in rehab earlier this year, but she did tell me that one of her biggest issues was coping with her own success. “Up until recently, I was really uncomfortable with having success and enjoying it,” Mendes says. “I just couldn’t deal with that. How can I have so much? It’s not fair. How can the world have so little?…I allowed it to mess with me in the sense that I just didn’t know how to handle it.”

Things are different now. “I’ve really broken it down to this simple thing: I deal with everything by giving it away,” Mendes explains. “It’s genius. It works.”

She literally gives things away, like the new pair of Cartier sunglasses she insisted an elderly friend of hers keep when she tried them on. “I said, ‘You need to have them. They look really good on you,’ ” Mendes says.

[From E! Online]

Mendes also talked about her group of female friends and how they’ve helped her get through problems and mentioned the boyfriend she rarely talks about, filmmaker George Augusto, saying he understands her as he’s from a family of five sisters:

In director and writer Diane English’s upcoming The Women, Mendes plays Crystal Allen, a smokin’ hot Saks salesgirl having an affair with married businessman Stephen Haines. Like Stephen’s wife Mary (Meg Ryan), Mendes credits the women in her life for getting her through the tough (and happy) times. “I’ve run into some women in my life who are like, ‘I don’t have any girl friends. I only have guy friends,'” Mendes says. “And I’m like to the guys, ‘Run for the hills when you hear a girl who says she only has guy friends.’ That is a bad situation, because all women should have their base of girls.”

Where does that leave her longtime filmmaker boyfriend George Augusto? “He actually grew up with all women in his family,” Mendes says. “His mom has five sisters, so he gets it.”

[From E! Online]

Mendes next stars in The Women with Meg Ryan, Annette Benning and Jada Pinkett Smith. There are no men shown in the film, just like the 1939 original version it’s based on. Mendes joked that she pictured someone specific when thinking about the married man her bombshell character is having an affair with but says she can’t say who he was because “Those are secrets of the trade.” The Women is out the US on September 12.

Here are photos from the premiere of The Women last night also featuring Meg Ryan, Annette Benning and Warren Beatty, Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith, Debra Messing, Candice Bergen, Cloris Leachman, and Debi Mazar. Credit: Juan Rico/Fame Pictures