The Visions of Penélope Cruz

She already felt a mystical connection with the director Pedro Almodóvar. For their seventh collaboration, “Parallel Mothers,” she gave her all, even collapsing after one scene.

You have to wonder if Penélope Cruz manifested her first phone call from Pedro Almodóvar. As a young girl growing up in Madrid, she watched Betamax tapes of his movies over and over, hoping that the Spanish auteur might find a place for her in his bright and bold world. She dreamed about it so often that the day he did phone her about a role, it didn’t even feel like the first call — it felt like the tenth, or the hundredth, from someone she already knew very well.

That bond was further confirmed when Almodóvar summoned her to his apartment to read scenes. Cruz was still a fledgling actress — it was 1992, and her first two movies, “Jamón Jamón” and “Belle Epoque,” had only just come out — but as she batted lines back and forth with the far more established Almodóvar in his kitchen, their connection couldn’t have been more natural.

“It’s hard to explain without sounding weird,” she told me, “but we know each other, we can feel each other, we can read each other’s minds.”