Juan Naharro Gimenez / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images
By
January Nelson
“I was doing Zoolander when my dad died. We were shooting it on a Friday night. He died at two in the morning. I’m really young, I had a heart attack. I remember being very close to passing out from shock. Two weeks before that, the same thing happened to Ben Stiller and his mother. The movie couldn’t stop for him, or for me. Every time I see Ben, I think, ‘Penelow’.”
Penelope Cruz’s father died of a heart attack at 2 am on Friday. On Monday morning he was back in Rome, shooting a comedy and trying to make people laugh.
His father, Eduardo Cruz, was 62 years old. He died at his home in Spain on the morning of June 18, 2015, while his daughter was filming Zoolander 2. He had a history of heart problems, but the attacks still came from outside. He flew to Madrid for the funeral on Sunday and returned to Rome on set the next morning. Production was not paused.
“I’m really young, I suddenly had a heart attack. I remember being very close to panicking,” she told PORTER magazine.
Two weeks earlier, Ben Stiller had lost his mother, singer and actress Anne Meara, who died on May 23, 2015, at the age of 85. He was in the middle of the same picture. The two characters depended on each other in it, bearing the same loss in a comedy that did not make room for either of them.
“The movie couldn’t stop him, or me,” Cruz said. “Every time I see Ben, I think, ‘Wow, what we went through.'”
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