Penelope Cruz is terrified of driving after witnessing her sister get run over.
Penelope Cruz is afraid of driving
The 'Ferrari' actress experienced a "great trauma" when she was just nine years old after her younger sibling Mónica Cruz was hit by a car and lost consciousness, resulting in the 49-year-old star developing a reluctance to ever get behind the wheel.
She told America's Elle magazine: "I have a fear of driving. My sister was run over by a car in front of me when I was eight or nine. I remember she was wearing a red coat.
"And for me, time stopped. It’s a great trauma, because I saw her losing consciousness. And I was numb in the hospital, telling people, ‘Oh, my sister just got run over by a car.’”
Monica, now 46, made a full recovery, but Penelope suspects she "would have been hysterical" if she witnessed such a severe accident in adulthood.
The 'Vanilla Sky' actress - who has Leo, 12, and 10-year-old Luna with husband Javier Bardem - revealed she has therapy to find a "balance" to deal with the level of empathy she feels.
Explaining she experiences a "back-and-forth dance between fiction and reality" which "plays into a certain stereotype" of actors, she added: “I’m lucky to have it, but maybe it makes me feel or suffer things more.
"I can feel it; it’s like a hypersensitivity in every way - visually, to sound, to people’s feelings.
"It’s been one of the main things I deal with in therapy: how to work a balance so I can keep feeling those things without making those feelings my own.”
But while Penelope finds some of her roles "uncomfortable and painful" as a result, she thinks they always make her a better person by the end of a shoot.
She said: "Sometimes [the characters I play] can be uncomfortable and painful. It’s hard to let them go, but at the end, I always feel they made me a little bit more compassionate than I was two months ago.
"And with the safety net that you know this is not your reality. It creates less judging and more compassion in every area of my life.”
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