Elena Anaya: Almodóvar's new leading lady
The Skin I Live In star on the 'terrifying responsibility' of working with Spain's great director, Pedro Almodóvar
Ten years ago, the Spanish film-maker
Pedro Almodóvar called Elena Anaya and asked to meet. She went to Madrid and immediately the director started to apologise profusely; he had a tiny role in his new project, he explained, but he couldn't imagine anyone else playing it. The young actor told him to stop: "I said to him I would be a vase or a lampshade if he wanted – facing a wall or whatever," she remembers now. The film was
Talk to Her and Almodóvar was not exaggerating; Anaya's part is so small that when her father went to the premiere, he didn't even notice she was in it.
A decade on, Almodóvar called again. The intervening years had been good to both of them: Almodóvar had evolved his lurid, exuberant early films into subtler and more profound later work;
Talk to Her won an Oscar and he continued to move from art house to our house with
Volver and
Broken Embraces. Anaya, meanwhile, had been building her reputation with fearless performances in home-grown films such as
Sex and Lucia and
Room in Rome, and gently infiltrating the mainstream in
Van Helsing and
Mesrine.
Now Almodóvar said he had another part that would be perfect for Anaya, and this time she would not be required to play a household object. It was in fact the lead female role in an adaptation of a trashy 1984 French novella,
Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, which the director had been working on for years. "My entire blood stopped for a few seconds," says Anaya. She starts to whisper, and her entrancing eyes – one deep brown, the other lighter – grow wider. "I couldn't believe it. Everything was part of a dream and I am still inside the dream now."
"Elena's main feature is how far she can go in the most compromising scenes, I mean physically," says Almodóvar. "She is very good at difficulties and tension. She's very open-minded, the word 'risk' is part of her work. This is why I picked her."
So Anaya would join this illustrious company in the new film,
The Skin I Live In. The reality struck the 36-year-old from Palencia in northern Spain immediately. "As soon as Pedro tells you, 'It's you!', all these scary thoughts come in to your head," she says, her English lightly accented. "You start to feel this incredible responsibility. You think: I have to do this well. I won't lie to you, it's completely terrifying."
Anaya seems to have been a woman on the verge of a breakthrough for years now. Born in July 1975, a few months before General Franco died, she is the youngest of three children; her father was an industrial engineer and her mother a housewife. Franco was no patron of the arts, closing the national cinema school and forcing many artists and film-makers out of the country, and Anaya believes that Spain has been catching up ever since.
"Even though it was 36 years ago, Franco has been like a big brick," she explains over drinks in a London hotel. "
Ladrillo is a word we have in Spain, it is like a heavy piece of stone in the middle of creation. And it affected a whole generation of people growing up."
One of the problems, she believes, is that no one could see English-language films – even now original-version cinemas are rare in Spain. Anaya herself learned to speak English the hard way. When she was 13, she was sent for a month to Clay Cross, a mining town in north Derbyshire. In the airport on the way out, her sister had taught her the only words she knew: "I don't understand you." Anaya had asked to be billeted with a family with children her age; instead she was allocated to a childless couple, both of whom were 18 years old and who mostly ignored her for the duration of her stay, although they did leave explicit instructions to clean out their rabbit hutch.
"It was a disaster," she says. "On the first day, they gave me tomato soup in a can for breakfast. I tried to remember what my sister told me, but I could only say, 'I understand you'. And they said, 'OK, that's fine'. I lost a lot of weight that month."
Curiously, the following year she decided to return to England, although to a new family. This time she landed in a house in the middle of a cemetery. The son was obsessed with
Ghostbusters and the daughter had a nasty dose of "chicken-poops". Anaya laughs. "I loved it. It was creepy and surreal, but my life is always a little bit surreal."
When Anaya was 18 she went to Madrid to audition for drama school, but instead landed the lead in her first feature,
Africa. That was half her life ago, and she has worked consistently ever since. "But it doesn't get any easier," she says. "That first film I was scared and nervous because I didn't study acting at school, but at the same time I was 18. Now I'm not, and every day it is harder and harder.
"I think of Gena Rowlands in the film
Opening Night," she continues. "She plays a very famous actress who is surrounded by people dressing her and doing her makeup and her hair. But then they all leave and she has to walk down the corridor to the stage on her own. When you are an actor, you walk alone for that last part."
The Skin I Live In follows a suave plastic surgeon, Dr Robert Ledgard, played by another Almodóvar favourite,
Antonio Banderas, whose wife was badly burnt in a car crash. He becomes obsessed with how he could have saved her and starts to develop a heat- and disease-resistant transgenic skin that is still sensitive to the human touch. Twelve years on, he succeeds, but he needs a human guinea pig to test it on, and thisis where Anaya's character Vera comes in.
In our first sightings of Vera, she is dressed in a flesh-coloured body stocking, her legs contorted in a yoga asana. Through flashbacks we see her being operated on in Ledgard's private laboratory and then, as her scars heal, she is bald with a protective silicone covering on her face that footballers sometimes wear to protect a busted nose. She spends her life locked up in a sealed room in his idyllic Toledo mansion, a deluxe prison. Her food is delivered by dumb waiter and her only release is yoga, which she learns from one of the three television channels she can access, and the art of the confessional sculptor Louise Bourgeois, which she painstakingly recreates.
There may be echoes of
Frankenstein but it emerges that Dr Ledgard is attempting to create something more finessed with Vera: he wants the frail beauty of a human but with supernatural powers. "Vera is like a doll, the perfect woman who never loved him," says Anaya. "But she has to be an incredible actor. Every day she has to do a performance, she can't give him a clue that she is planning to cheat him and escape from this jail as soon as she has the chance."
The setup is classic Almodóvar – Banderas put it best when he said that he wasn't sure if he was acting in Shakespeare or a cheap Mexican soap opera – and it plays out in ways more bizarre than you could imagine. Through it all, Anaya is a quiet revelation: she stalks her cell like a wild animal and gives Vera a cool detachment that you do not expect from an Almodóvar heroine. Before the shoot, the director gave her an esoteric selection of references including films such as
Babyface and
DoubleIndemnity, Alice Munro's short-story collection
Runaway and the autobiographies of Janet Frame, who spent a decade in psychiatric hospitals before being acknowledged as one of New Zealand's greatest authors. The message, it seems, is that he saw Vera as a survivor.
"I could talk to you for hours about the notes he gave me," says Anaya. "With Pedro, you don't build up your own role. You have to almost go through his mind to get to the character. Every little moment he directs you and you have to be obedient and quick to follow his path to wherever he wants to take you." Almodóvar, for his part, has said he is delighted by the intensity she brought to the role: "I'm very happy with Elena's performance because I think it was the most complex to do."
Almodóvar says that Anaya is part of "the family" now, and it is clear that she loves being one of his women. The pair have become friends and are regular companions in the front row of fashion shows and courtside watching Rafa Nadal. "Pedro is somebody I would like to have close in my life," she says. Anaya's only reservation is the extra attention she has started to attract since The Skin I Live In premiered in Cannes in May. "It's true that you become more famous, which is the worst part of it in a way, because I think that privacy is a right that all humans should have."
Anaya makes sure that little is known about her private life. She likes cooking, she practised Shotokan karate for 15 years ("You have to have a black belt in 15 years, otherwise you are very bad") and she loves to free dive, but she is not prepared to go deeper than that. "I think I am incredibly generous with how much I give to my projects, but that's my generosity with the job," she says. "I am not generous about telling people who I am and what I like to do because it's my life and it only belongs to me and my friends and family."
The day before we meet, Anaya happened to eat in the same a restaurant as Tilda Swinton, one of her heroes. "It was a crazy, funny place and here was one of the top actresses in the world having her normal life with her family," she says. "So there are other ways of being respected in this business. I don't want to think my life will change at all." She smiles sweetly and you hope she's right.
