Penelope Cruz is Esquire’s Sexiest Woman Alive for 2014

 

J-Law who? Scar-Jo what? According to Esquire, it’s all about P-Cru.

Penelope Cruz (or “P-Cru,” as she is increasingly known), 40, is the magazine’s Sexiest Woman Alive for 2014.

She’s the feature of a long and tortured cover story in the November issue of Esquire, which features a great deal of bullfight metaphors, but not too much from the Oscar-winning actress herself. Among the more interesting tidbits is a quote on how Cruz’s approach to acting has changed over the course of her career:

 

I’ve played a lot of tricks on myself. I’ve made it hard for me sometimes, especially in my teens and twenties. I had an attraction to drama. Most of us have that, especially if you are an artist—you feel like you are tempted to explore the darkness. I could not be less interested now. For me, the most attractive, charming, cool, fun, interesting thing—how could I call it? A plan.

 

 

Also of note? Sometimes her husband, Javier Bardem, will speak to her in character as Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men, and Cruz “has to run out of the house.”

And–in a perhaps unsurprising reveal–one of the famously reserved and tight-lipped P-Cru’s favorite lines from literature belongs to Hamlet: “Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

 

 

You can next see Cruz in the Spanish language Ma Ma, in which her character suffers from a shocking and undisclosed illness; and, next year, in the Sacha Baron Cohen-penned comedy Grimsby.