Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem to star in Asghar Farhadi film

Oscar-winning couple will begin shooting next year

Oscar-winning Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem will star in a new film set in Spain by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, reported The Guardian. Farhadi, who won the foreign-language Oscar in 2012 for A Separation about a middle-class couple’s divorce, is currently finishing the original screenplay for the movie.

“The idea is to film in Spain, we still don’t know where. It is an intense drama which is a gift for actors. And it is a luxury to work with the director of A Separation,” Cruz said. The plot of the movie, which remains mostly under wraps, revolves around a family of winemakers living in rural Spain. Shooting is expected to begin next year.

Cruz and Bardem, who got married in the Bahamas in 2010, are currently working on Escobar, a movie about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Bardem plays Escobar and Cruz plays his lover, journalist Virginia Vallejo, in their first film together since the 2008 Woody Allen romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Cruz shared it feels wonderful that the couple have the chance to work together once again in Farhadi’s new film. “No one planned it. And we are not going to work together in everything, but if things come up (for both of us) and they make sense, why not?”

She previously won an Oscar for the Best Supporting Actor Female in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Bardem, 47, also won the same award for the 2007 crime thriller No Country for Old Me. The couple first met while filming Jamon, Jamon in 1992, one of Cruz’s first films.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2016.

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