Here’s Penelope on the cover of November’s Vanity Fair. While I really like almost everything about the cover shot, they should have rethought Penelope’s makeup. Those cat-eyes make her look like she had a bad facelift. Other than that, it’s very sexy.

Over the weekend, the NY Daily News ran a gossip piece about the continuing pregnancy rumors surrounding Penelope. The pregnancy rumors swirled for most of the summer, and then Penelope denied them in total while at the Toronto Film Festival two weeks ago. Anyway, the NYDN ran a story about Penelope and her hottie boyfriend Javier Bardem exiting an ob-gyn clinic last week, and how Pene was “glowing” and Javier was “tightly clutching a large, white envelope”. For the record, Penelope’s denial to the pregnancy question was “No, I’m not.” No room for question about it, really.

Now Penelope is giving a more formal denial in the November issue of Vanity Fair. The full interview is on VF’s site as well as a retrospective portfolio of Penelope’s previous appearances in VF. I’ve skimmed the article on VF’s site, and it’s a little light on actual quotes from Penelope. The writer, Ingrid Sischy, is too interested in telling her own personal stories to get anything really juicy out of Penelope. Here are some of the highlights, via Huffington Post:

Penélope Cruz, notoriously private and press-shy, tells Vanity Fair contributing editor Ingrid Sischy in a rare revealing moment that she is not pregnant with boyfriend Javier Bardem’s baby.

“My most nosy Parker question–one that I felt it was my duty as a reporter to ask–was whether the widespread rumors that there was a wee Bardem-Cruz on the way were true,” writes Sischy. “Here, unlike before, there was no telling silence from Cruz. Instead she answered no but in a rather baroque, roundabout way, detailing how [director Pedro] Almodóvar had tried, to no avail, to put that rumor to rest when a journalist asked him about it on a red carpet.”

Normally mum when it comes to her relationship with Bardem (“It’s more that she is protective of their privacy to a point that is striking even for performers who don’t like to kiss and tell,” Sischy writes), when Sischy brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that she’d heard Cruz was playing air guitar during some of the songs, Cruz squealed with delight, saying, “Javier is even better at air guitar!”

Sischy asks Cruz who was a better kisser: Scarlett Johansson, with whom she shared a famous make-out session in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, or Charlize Theron, whom Cruz smooched in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds. “No matter how I answer that I will be in trouble,” she says. “Both were pretty beautiful partners.”

Sophia Loren–Cruz’s co-star in the upcoming film Nine–tells Sischy that Cruz “has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Sischy writes that Cruz’s anxiety is fascinating, coming from someone who is so fearless on-screen. “I’ve always been a worrier,” says Cruz. “Since I was a little girl I’ve always felt that if I had a moment of peace I’d wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?”

Woody Allen, Cruz’s director for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, is effusive in his assessment of her ability, but tells Sischy, “I never thought about her as a person, because when I work I’m not interested in the person except as a performer. When she turned out to be lovely, that was nice, but I would have been O.K. if she had been a bitch.” Regarding her beauty, he adds: “I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.”

On the set of Nine, director Rob Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes–she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel [Day-Lewis] was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior. We had told her she should wear gloves, but she was like, ‘No, no, no–I have to feel it.’ There’s this huge sheath of pink satin that she slides down on. When we finished the number she had disappeared behind the satin and was in tears. I said, ‘Are you unhappy with what you did?’ She said, ‘No, no. It’s that it is over, and I loved every second. I want to install ropes in my bedroom so I don’t have to let go of it.’ “

[From Vanity Fair via Huffington Post]

I can’t wait to see Nine. But not really for Penelope, I want to see it for Daniel Day-Lewis and Sophia Loren. I can’t wait to see Daniel sing, dance and romance. God knows, he’ll probably get yet another Oscar. In case anyone is unfamiliar with the project, this is how it went: in the 1963, Fredrico Fellini made a film called 8 ½, based on his own life, his own marriage and affairs and his relationships with the women he loved. The film was turned into a Broadway musical (called Nine) in the 1980s, and ended up winning a slew of Tonys. There was always talk about making the musical into a film, and now Chicago director Rob Marshall has done it. The film’s cast is kind of amazing – in addition to Day-Lewis and Cruz, there’s Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard and Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson. Cannot. Wait.

Here’s Penelope looking tired and uncomfortable while working on the set of her new film on September 8th in Los Angeles. Images thanks to Fame Pictures .