Academy Award winner Penélope Cruz used to prepare for her upcoming roles by actually staying in character for weeks, even months at a time. It sounds stressful and a tad crazy, but she doesn’t do that anymore.
“When I was younger, I tried to do the opposite. I tried to be in that state for whatever it took, like weeks or months,” Cruz told Steve Pond at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “I realized that was so suffocating that it would make both the scene worse and life worse.”
She credited her Argentinian acting teacher and theatre director Juan Carlos Corazza for teaching her this new method. He taught her how to get in and, especially, out of character throughout a single day, sometimes within the same hour, instead of staying zoned in character.
“I had to trust that jumping in and out of fiction and reality, that dance, was going to make the work better and my mental health also safer,” Cruz said.
Writer-director Florian Zeller wrote “Bunker” specifically for Cruz and her husband Javier Bardem. It’s the first time the real-life couple has played a stable married pair on-screen together.
Corazza’s training came in handy, especially during “Bunker’s” big argument scene, which took about three days to shoot. In the marital thriller, Cruz stars as book editor Sofia, married to Bardem’s Miguel, an architect whose decision to build a survivalist bunker for a billionaire sends their marriage into crisis.
“I would be lying if I told you that some moments didn’t affect me,” Cruz said. “But it’s not different from other movies. It’s not like, ‘Oh, it affected me because I’m working with my husband.’”
Bardem said the idea for that scene came up before production began.
“I want to play that scene with you, and you go, ‘Why would you like to do that if you are married?’” Bardem said. “Because it’s a great exercise to create it and to be able to see the thin line between fiction and reality. Bring your own stuff to it, but without being confused. So when they say cut, we leave it there, and we become who we are.”
Bardem added that Zeller kept pulling the both of them back to the story whenever things got really intense.
“He was very, very good at always taking us to the path of the fiction when things would get messy,” Bardem said. “Not because we want to get messy, but because during the middle of the storm, he was always like, this way, this way.”
Cruz felt so relieved once the scene wrapped.
“I felt like, okay, we survived this,” Cruz said. “I always knew that if that scene didn’t work, that could really hurt the film.”
In his review of the film, The Wrap’s Ben Croll wrote: “Through Spanish stars and Hollywood gloss, ‘Bunker,’ above all else, channels the sensibility of a French playwright. Recognizing that is key to unlocking this tonally idiosyncratic marital drama, which swings between bourgeois farce and psychological thriller, tackling a raft of topical concerns by bringing them into the house.”
Sony Pictures Classics will release “Bunker” in early 2027.
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