All About Eva

After playing one too many sexy detectives, Eva Mendes romances Will Smith in the comedy Hitch.

By Brooke Hauser
Photographed by Tierney Gearon

It's impossible not to look at Eva Mendes’s lips, which are pink and as full as change purses and tend to get in the way when she talks. One can hardly blame Harry Dean Stanton, her septuagenarian costar in the upcoming indie The Wendell Baker Story, directed by Luke and Andrew Wilson, for seizing the moment one evening when she tried to give him a kiss on the cheek. “He did that fake-out thing, and he had his mouth totally open,” says Mendes, chewing a bite of eggs Benedict at the Village Coffee Shop in L.A. “Harry Dean Stanton totally open-mouthed me in front of, like, fourteen people! It was actually kind of adorable. It’s hard to get offended when it’s obvious they’re not going to score with you. They’re just trying to have fun.”

By all accounts, Mendes, 28, is one cool chica, the sort of frills-free, laid-back companion you’d want to take on a road trip—or, if you’re Cameron Diaz, on a jaunt to Nepal. “She’s doing this show for MTV where she takes a few celebrities to remote places in the world to promote environmental consciousness,” says Mendes, who, a few days from now, will be camping with Diaz, Redman, and “that dude from Blink-182.”

Like Diaz, whom she met at a dinner party thrown by the Farrelly brothers, Mendes has earned a reputation as “a guy’s girl, not a shrinking violet,” says her 2 Fast 2 Furious director, John Singleton. While on location with Paul Walker, she broke it down Miami-style, club-hopping and playing wingwoman for her male costars. But the Cuban-American actress insists that times have changed, and so has she. “They know me as a certain Eva: fun, South Beach Eva who loved to have a few drinks after work and hang out with the boys,” she says, pulling down the edges of her woolly black bucket hat. “Now, I’m in such a different place.”

That place is the coveted though precarious position of an actress who could break big, opposite Will Smith, in this month’s Hitch. Coincidentally, Mendes got one of her first gigs in Smith’s 1997 music video for “Miami.” Though she immediately warmed to her future costar, “I was really miserable acting for a while,” Mendes says. “You can create a hole for yourself by being the Chiquita banana girl.”

If anyone is equipped to stamp out the ethnic stereotypes propagated by the likes of Scarface and Ricky Ricardo, it’s Mendes, who has made it something of a personal mission to steer clear of movies like 2003’s Chasing Papi, for which she was sent the script. “I thought it was an embarrassment to Latins, to everybody, really,” she says. “One of the lines was like, ‘Sorry, honey, I’m no cheap taco.’ It wasn’t even cleverly stereotypical.”

Born in Miami, Mendes grew up the youngest of four in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake neighborhood, and spent weekends at the Mann Chinese Theatre, where her mother (who was separated from her father) worked as a cashier. “This was back in the day when they still wore these long Chinese gowns. It was so glamorous. I was so proud of her,” Mendes says. Her father is a meat distributor. “We grew up without much financially, [but] one thing we never lacked was meat.”

Discovered by a neighbor photographer at a yard sale when she was still a marketing major at Cal State Northridge, she made her inauspicious movie debut with Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror, for which she politely declined to take off her shirt. Nonetheless, she has played her fair share of screen candy: a lesbian boom operator in Urban Legends: Final Cut, a big-breasted ditz in the Farrellys’ Stuck On You, and one too many sexy detectives. “I’m kind of over the cop thing right now,” she says. “I guess I come off as really hard. You know, Special Agent Mendes. ‘Give that woman a gun!’ ”

In fact, Mendes is exquisitely vulnerable, in the way only tough girls can be. It’s not just her beauty, with its muted angularity, like beach glass smoothed over, or the way she says “What a trip!” when there’s a lull in conversation. Several times during lunch, she almost topples her coffee cup with her elbow. Once, she asks for a refill and colors pinkly when the waitress doesn’t hear. A soft sheen of sweat collects above her upper lip. Finally, she explains: “I’ve learned in the last couple of years, no matter who I’m with, I can’t try to impress. That’s where everything seems to go wrong with me, and it usually manifests itself physically.”

Antoine Fuqua was the first director to put Mendes’s blend of edginess and emotional honesty to good use. In 2001’s Training Day, she gave a brief but bewitching performance as the poor Latina mistress of a corrupt police officer, played by Denzel Washington. Much attention has been paid to Mendes’s nude scene (“I pushed the pause button a few times,” admits Singleton), but she shrugs it off. “I was totally naked, and [Denzel] was fully dressed. It establishes a lot about their relationship,” she says. “What’s funny is initially it was just a topless scene, and I said to Antoine, ‘I think that’s a cop out. Why would he have her just topless?’ He gave me the reason, and I said, ‘Well, then, her panties would be off. It wouldn’t be this half-ass thing. This is a serious movie—let’s do it.’ ”

Hitch is not a “serious” movie; it’s a romantic comedy about a matchmaker (Smith) and a gossip columnist (Mendes) who fall in love against all odds. But when asked how she prepared for her part, Mendes grows quiet. “Sorry, I have to go back and look at my work,” she says, steepling her fingers beneath her nose.

For the past four years, Mendes has been studying under acting instructor Ivana Chubbuck (whom, she notes, fellow Revlon model Halle Berry thanked in her Oscar acceptance speech). A newly converted deconstructionist—and champion of Chubbuck’s book, The Power of the Actor: The Chubbuck Technique—The 12-Step Acting Technique That Will Take You From Script to a Living, Breathing, Dynamic Character—Mendes has lost the luxury of leisure, and now approaches each role as if it were a test.

“I think she worked extra hard because she’s not classically trained, so there’s a tenacity to make up for lost time, to be taken seriously,” says Hitch director Andy Tennant, who has guided such actresses as Reese Witherspoon, Jodie Foster, and Drew Barrymore. Though she had no problem going full frontal in Training Day, Mendes is all nerves when it comes to actually showing intimacy. “Eva has a very bad habit when she’s about to do a kissing scene: She eats,” says Tennant. “Most actors are brushing their teeth, they’re using Altoids, but there’s Eva stuffing her face with a tuna-fish sandwich or a cupcake. It just makes her incredibly shy.”

She doesn’t seem so shy on the final day of shooting, in front of Manhattan’s International Toy Center, which has been converted into the headquarters for a fictional newspaper, The New York Standard. After doing a transition scene, in which her character is castigated by her editor (Adam Arkin) for missing a celebrity photo op, Mendes trades some friendly banter with producer Teddy Zee. “Hey, aren’t you coming out with a CD soon?” he asks, possibly referring to another Latina actress on the block. Mendes rolls her eyes. “Listen, the last thing the world needs is . . . never mind.”

In fact, Mendes clarifies later, she loves Jennifer Lopez and seems to have her own aspirations to be a media hyphenate. When she isn’t filming or fulfilling her Revlon contract, Mendes might be found illustrating her upcoming children’s book, Crazy Leggs Beshee, about a long-limbed girl who turns into a walking disaster when she gets nervous. And, until recently, she and her boyfriend, a photographer, managed an indie-rock band called the Tigers. “We recorded the demo in our living room, so you can actually hear cars in the background,” she says.

As a Hispanic actress working in the studio system, perhaps her biggest contribution is yet to come. Lopez did it for Puerto Ricans. Hayek did it for Mexicans. Now, Mendes hopes to redefine how Hollywood sees Cubans, by developing Ana Menendez’s novel Loving Che, about a young artist who has an affair with Che Guevara during the revolution. Of course, she’s the perfect actress for the part.

“I love the fact that I’m Cuban. I wouldn’t be who I am if I wasn’t. I wouldn’t have these hips!” Mendes says, gesturing toward her behind, encased in a pair of pink clamdiggers, a perfect February valentine. “I’m the real deal.”