Penélope Cruz Says She’s Experienced “Many” Brain Aneurysm Scares

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Penélope Cruz doesn’t joke around about her health.

After comments the Pirates of the Caribbean star made regarding a brain aneurysm while filming her new movie The Black Ball went viral, she admitted it’s an experience she’s faced more than once.

“I have had many scares like that,” Cruz admitted in an interview with Porter magazine published July 6. “Fortunately, I’m fine, it was a false alarm, but I worry about staying healthy, taking care of myself.”

But The Invite actress is taking every measure she can.

“I don’t drink,” she continued. “I don’t smoke. I really don’t party. Without health, we have nothing. You want to talk about real equality? Why don’t we start with health?”

With each passing year, Cruz—who shares kids Leo, 15, and Luna, 12 with husband Javier Bardem—gets more grateful for her continued health, not to mention her ability to land a job.

“In my twenties, people were already asking me if I was afraid of getting older,” she recalled. “I got asked that question so many times. My way to battle it then was just not answering. I was not going to give weight or importance to that question.”

Indeed, the 52-year-old doesn’t see her age as an inhibitor. As she put it, “The level of diversity in the women that I have been offered to play has maintained, maybe gotten even greater.”

Nevertheless, she has faced her fair share of struggle. During the Cannes Film Festival in May, she recalled receiving what she thought was life-altering news while shooting The Black Ball.

“We’re about to go out, I was putting on my wig, and they said, ‘Oh, apparently you have some brain aneurysm,’” Cruz recalled on stage at the film’s festival screening, per Variety. “I thought I was about to die. This is something that was totally surreal in my life.”

But while she took the evening off, she was later cleared by her doctor to continue shooting, and she explained that it made the role feel all the more important.

“I thought, ‘It’s a total miracle,’” Cruz explained. “I have to, I must have this in me."

Araya Doheny/Getty Images for SAG-AFTRA Foundation

And going through the ordeal with the film’s crew, Cruz explained, made her role as cabaret dancer Nené come alive.

“You experience these things together,” she detailed, “yet despite all this, despite the hardship, you can move forward in life.”

For more stars who have shared insight into health scares, keep reading…

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