Eva Mendes appearing on the cover of the July issue of W, on newsstands June 22.
“I’ve never had a problem with nudity,” she says in the W story, “but I don’t put it out there without a reason. I’m not an exhibitionist. But, honestly, for my art I’ll do anything, almost. I’ll go there.”
she says, “I know I walk a fine line between being a respected actor and being what they call a sex symbol. It’s a hard one to walk if you want to be known as a real, credible actor. But I’ve never felt objectified. Nothing you see me do is an accident. . . . I’m incredibly calculated when it comes to my career.”
On her dual passions: “I’m a modern woman in the sense of I take care of myself, I’m fiercely independent, and I’m really ambitious. Yet I have these old-school thoughts in my mind. I do like to belong to a man. I love having a man in my life, and being his woman at the end of the day. I know it’s a dichotomy.” Mendes, 36, met her current love, music producer George Augusto, shortly after high school, and the two now own a midcentury house in the Hollywood Hills.
On her ethnicity: “I don’t consider myself a Latin American actress. I was born and raised here, and I have Cuban parents, but for me, I am the new American girl. It’s not only Drew Barrymore and the blond Mid-western girl. This, [pointing to her face] is also what we look like now.”
