The Hollywood power couple have been married since 2010, and are the parents of two children.
Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem are raising their children their own way!
In the latest issue of Elle, the mother-of-two offers rare comments about her life at home with Bardem and their children, Luna, 10, and Leo,12. The Ferrari actress notes that she tries to keep her kids out of the spotlight as much as possible.
"It's for them to decide if they are going to have a job that is more exposed to the public or not," the 49-year-old actress tells the magazine. "They can talk about that when they're ready."
One decision she's making for her children is a no cellphone and no social media policy, which she takes a firm stance on.
"It’s so easy to be manipulated, especially if you have a brain that is still forming," she explains. "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."
However, Luna and Leo aren't without entertainment. At home, Cruz says their father takes center stage with hilarious impressions.
"He sings and he's a great dancer," she muses of Bardem's impromptu performances for the family. "And he does this amazing impression of Mick Jagger. He'll imitate Al Pacino and [Robert] De Niro talking to each other. It’s incredible."
Cruz is no stranger to playing a mother, and notes that her longtime collaborator and director, Pedro Almodóvar, has always seen it in her.
"Pedro always saw me as a mother," she says of the maternal roles she has portrayed throughout her career. "I think so. 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."
Today, as she approaches 50 in April, she knows that motherhood will be a big part of her professional career, and she's not scared or ashamed to enter this phase as and actress.
"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," she tells Elle. "I've played mothers since I was very young."
Earlier this month, ET spoke to Cruz about how she feels about turning 50 and entering a new decade.
"I'm really looking at it as the beginning of the second part of my life," she shared with ET, joking that while she's not "happy" with the industry's obsession with using AI, it could be useful to keep her around "much longer" while she spends time with her kids and future grandkids.
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