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Cannes golden couple Bardem and Cruz return to open festival

It was where Javier Bardem memorably declared his love for Penelope Cruz in 2010. Now the golden couple of Spanish cinema will open this year's Cannes film festival together on Tuesday (May 8).

Published: 7 May 2018 10:12 CEST

Cannes golden couple Bardem and Cruz return to open festival

Cruz and Bardem are starring together in two films in 2018: Everybody Knows and Loving Pablo (pictured). Photo: Screenshot

The Oscar-winning actors both star in Iranian master Asghar Farhadi's Spanish psychological thriller Everybody Knows, which will kick off the festival and is up for the top Palme d'Or prize.

The couple's glowing return to the spotlight in Cannes comes after Bardem emotionally proclaimed his feelings for Cruz there eight years ago as he accepted the best actor award for Biutiful.

Cruz has also won at Cannes, sharing the 2006 best actress prize with five other women for their work in acclaimed Spanish film-maker Pedro Almodovar's drama Volver.

Bardem, 49, and Cruz, 44, have two children together and married in 2010 on an island in the Bahamas owned by their friend, US actor Johnny Depp.

Photo: AFP

They also share a notable distinction – they are respectively the first Spanish man and woman to win an acting Oscar.

Bardem won his best supporting actor Academy Award in 2008 for his role as a determined murderer in the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men.

The following year, Cruz took home the best actress Oscar for playing a fiery artist in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

But the couple live discreetly in a Madrid suburb, where they try to keep the spotlight away from their son Leo, seven, and daughter Luna, four.

The Hollywood couple are also starring together in another film set to reach cinemas in 2018: Loving Pablo. Bardem plays notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, while Cruz stars in the role of Virginia Vallejo, a journalist he had an affair with.

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Penelope Cruz: 'I have my personal war with technology'

Penelope Cruz on the red carpet at the screening of the film "Wasp Network" in Venice. Photo: AFP

Hollywood star Penelope Cruz warned Sunday that technology was driving high anxiety that would one day make “all our brains explode”.

The Spanish mother-of-two said she was worried about how children's mental health and development were being affected by the ubiquity of tech.

“I have my personal war with it,” she told reporters at the Venice film festival.

“I wish we could have lived in the 1990s for a little longer. For mental health issues that would have helped a lot, because I think things are going at a speed that we are unprepared for,” said the actress.

Cruz, 45, who is starring in “Wasp Network”, a thriller about five Cuban undercover agents who became heroes for infiltrating radical exile networks in Florida, said tech was coming to utterly dominate children's lives, hogging their time and imaginations.

“This might seem like an exaggeration to other people, but I am convinced that we were raised with a different relationships with technology,” she said.

“Right now children and teenagers are in contact so much with electronics and it takes the time away from children to learn to play, to have conversations, to be at a table having dinner talking to their family, or to be bored — which is something important we all should learn as children.”

Cruz, who has an eight-year-old son and six-year-old daughter with fellow Spanish star Javier Bardem, said our lives were being swallowed up by it.

Tech's daily dominance was “not only affecting children, but all of us…. It is something that is creating a lot of general anxiety and I wonder if this continues all of our brains are just going to explode,” said the actress, who made her name in “Jamon, Jamon” when she was only 15.

Cruz said that she hoped that rising fears about what we are doing to the planet would chime with a harder look at what tech was doing to us.

“I hope that there will be a movement for people to live in a different way, that will value a different pace, which leads us to the other big issue, what happens to the environment,” she added.

By AFP's Fiachra Gibbons

READ ALSO: There are still 16,000 public telephones in Spain

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