Eva Mendes gets dark and deep in New Orleans

Eva Mendes gets dark and deep in New Orleans
December 10, 2009
By AMY BIANCOLLI
Peep

Eva Mendes plays a hooker with a heart of gold in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a fascinatingly wacko Werner Herzog drama starring Nicolas Cage as an unhinged, crack-smoking post-Katrina cop. The film opens in Houston on Friday. She's his girlfriend, a fellow addict. And she is, in some ways, one of the most level-headed characters in the movie.

"I just saw her as a flawed person. I didn't really see her as anything else when I first signed on. I was planning on going for it: a prostitute who's addicted to drugs and codependent on some guy who's addicted to drugs -- and a rogue cop! It was amazing to me," says Mendes, on the phone from Los Angeles during a recent press event.

"But Werner was very careful and didn't want me to play to stereotype. He wanted me to be very elegant. I disagreed with that. The trained actress in me -- the actress who still goes to class and takes my craft very seriously -- I wanted to go darker and deeper and dirtier."

Mendes, best known for supporting roles in big releases (2 Fast 2 Furious, Hitch) and a few au naturel photo shoots, is a longtime fan of Herzog's work. "Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre, the Wrath of God -- they're up there for me." She'd heard all the stories of his relationship with the eccentric Klaus Kinski, she says, and had expected to find a "mad scientist" on the set. So what was it actually like, working with him? "Disappointing!" she says. "I wanted him to have a tantrum, or eat a shoe or something. He didn't."

The movie itself is plenty insane -- offering glimpses of Herzog's usual crazed wilderness, in the form of humongous crocodiles and hallucinated iguanas -- but Mendes found the man in charge a pleasure to be around, "really well-mannered and respectful." And he kept repeating that word to her: elegant.

In the end, Mendes says, "I think we avoided certain clichÃ©s by going this way." She winds up providing some needed balance opposite Cage's brilliant, unbuttoned performance, in which he tilts maniacally (like Kinski in Aguirre, but listing to the side) from one madman encounter to another. It's his best work in years. Maybe ever.

"I was so excited to see Nic going for it. I knew this would happen -- that's why I signed on," says Mendes, who also starred opposite Cage in the damnation-spouting Ghost Rider. "Some people might say it's over-the-top, but I think over-the-top is great. It's fearless, and I thought it was kind of inspired."

Though Mendes has never seen Harvey Keitel's performance in Abel Ferrara's original Bad Lieutenant, she's adamant that this one isn't a redo. Herzog has said it isn't, despite some clear parallels in character and plot. (As for Ferrara, he once said of the new film: "I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they're all in the same streetcar, and it blows up.")

Remake or no, Port of Call New Orleans is a far cry from childhood fantasies of the young Eva Mendes, who planned for years to become a nun. When the subject comes up, she responds with a laugh: "But I was 5 years old!"

"For some reason I was very prudish," she begins -- then laughs again. Most 5-year-olds are prudish by definition, she realizes. And she hasn't been accused of it lately.

Still ... "I was a very uptight, very anxious little girl. I had older sisters and brothers, and I had always promised my mother that I was going to do something with my life -- and buy her a house and pay her bills," she explains. "From 5 years old to 10 years old, I stuck to that nun thing. And we weren't even that religious of a family, but I wanted to be a nun. ... I thought all they did was serve God and have slumber parties."

Then, one day, her sister broke the news. "She said, 'Evie, do you know that nuns don't get paid?' I said, 'What?!' She said, 'Nuns don't get paid.' I was mortified that nuns didn't get paid. And that was that."

No more dreams of a religious calling. But when it came to helping her mother, the rest of the plan worked out fine. "I bought her a house," Mendes says, "and paid her bills." End of story