Penelope Cruz currently stars as Laura Ferrari, wife of Enzo Ferrari, in (you guessed it) Ferrari. Penelope covered a recent issue of Elle to talk about the film and other things. It’s been a minute since I’ve read a Cruz interview and I was surprised by how lovely and relaxed she seems. She turns 50 years old in April and she seems really happy and content where she is right now. She has two children, she’s married to Javier Bardem, she works consistently in Hollywood and Europe and she’s just like, eh, whatever is fine. Some highlights from her Elle interview:

The relationship between Laura & Enzo Ferrari: “I found all these letters between them, these real love letters where, even after everything was deteriorating for them as a couple, the love and respect was very strong, even if later there was a lot of betrayal. They built this company together. When we were filming in Modena, there’s so much other people didn’t know. Or didn’t want to know. I went to the factory and met people who knew Laura, and it’s like they didn’t want to mention how much power she had. You know she slept with the tires? The night before races, she would sleep with the tires so that no one would sabotage them. But people would say no, no, she was a difficult woman. Very sour and unpredictable. Some called her crazy. The word that has been used for every woman in history to justify suppression.”

She would never drive a Ferrari: “I have a fear of driving. My sister was run over by a car in front of me when I was eight or nine. I remember she was wearing a red coat. Speaking of red! And for me, time stopped. It’s a great trauma, because I saw her losing consciousness. And I was numb in the hospital, telling people, ‘Oh, my sister just got run over by a car.’”

She’s an empath: “I’m lucky to have it, but maybe it makes me feel or suffer things more. I can feel it; it’s like a hypersensitivity in every way—visually, to sound, to people’s feelings. It’s been one of the main things I deal with in therapy: how to work a balance so I can keep feeling those things without making those feelings my own.”

She has played mothers throughout her career: “At my age, 80 percent of the characters that I play will be about motherhood or divorce or abandonment or characters who didn’t want to have children or couldn’t or who lost children. I’ve played mothers since I was very young… Pedro [Almodovar] always saw me as a mother… We have known each other since I was 17. He would watch me going to talk to strangers just to see their babies. He always saw that strong, inevitable instinct in me, and I saw him see it. But also, ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted kids. But I knew I wanted them older. I wanted to wait until I felt I was ready. I was sure it would be the most important thing I would do in my life.”

Her children Luna, 10, and Leo, 12: “It’s for them to decide if they are going to have a job that is more exposed to the public or not. They can talk about that when they’re ready.” Cruz’s children do not have social media accounts, and they also “don’t even have phones. It’s so easy to be manipulated, especially if you have a brain that is still forming. And who pays the price? Not us, not our generation, who, maybe at 25, learned how a BlackBerry worked. It’s a cruel experiment on children, on teenagers.”

[From Elle]

Yeah, I’m starting to feel like Cruz and the “no phones/no social media” parents are actually right. As the years go on, I balk at little kids being on social media or being exposed to it, and it’s true that we still don’t know how it will affect kids long-term. I also think it’s interesting that Penelope apparently always knew that she wanted kids “later” in her life? She had her kids in her late 30s, which is quite common these days, but still. Maybe that’s how she always felt, but my guess is that once she got together with Javier, suddenly she knew she wanted to have babies right then.

Cover courtesy of Elle, additional photos courtesy of Avalon Red.