Oscar history could be made this year with a new rule allowing actors to score two nominations in one category. That honour seems likeliest for Penélope Cruz, who is absolute dynamite in two of the year’s best films: The Invite and La Bola Negra. She already has one Oscar on her shelf thanks to Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and was most recently nominated for Parallel Mothers, but she’s a winner regardless for the ferocious body of work that makes 2026 the year of Penélope Cruz.

Odds may be higher in her favour for the juicy role in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, especially as the summer sleeper hit stands to get renewed attention with its streaming release this week on HBO in the States and Paramount+ in Canada. Cruz plays Piña, the vivacious and sexually liberated neighbour to the unhappily married Angela and Joe, played Wilde and Seth Rogen. As the chaotic night quickly escalates from an innocent get together for drinks and jamón, with talk of Piña’s swinging ways with her boyfriend, Hawk (Edward Norton) spicing things up, Cruz’s cool-headed presence commands authority.

Cruz, speaking with That Shelf via Zoom, says she could draw upon her own experience with therapy and as Piña injects a voice of reason into the fray. “I’ve done a lot of therapy in my life and I will continue to do it forever if I can, because I feel like it always helps me to have a safe place to talk, to be able to say everything,” says Cruz, who’s been married to fellow actor Javier Bardem since 2010.

The Invite finds comedic gold as Angela’s awkwardness in articulating her desires contrasts wickedly with Piña’s ability to express herself smartly and smoothly, yet ooze total sex in the same breath. Cruz adds that she had an asset in psychologist Esther Perel, who served as one of the advisors on the film. Cruz says she called her every now and then, dabbling research with therapeutic convos.

“We always were looking for excuses to call her, to talk to her more. Olivia and I were like, ‘When do we have our next excuse to call her?’” says Cruz. “She’s an amazing woman and she gave me really important tools for this character so that she would never sound cliché. That was my biggest fear. When she suddenly becomes the therapist and sits down in front of them, she could not say anything that sounded cliché or like, ‘I’m going to tell you what to do.’ It had to be about the right questions and being very clever to make them talk to each other.”

While Piña offers a voice of reason in The Invite, Cruz also makes her a firecracker presence thanks to the constant sense of motion she conveys. Although The Invite plays out entirely in Angela and Joe’s apartment aside from an opening scene with the latter returning home, it burst with energy. That’s largely thanks to Cruz as Piña rejects stillness—an apt metaphor that distinguishes her relationship with Hawk from Angela and Joe’s stale marriage. Cruz conveys this sense by expressively moving Piña’s hands, playing with jewellery, using olives to pointedly make an argument about Joe’s aging testicles, and sneaking hits from her vape when nobody watches.

“I thought that she cannot really stay still,” says Cruz. “She goes there with a plan and she’s observing the mood of everyone, seeing if it’s going to be the right night or not, but she doesn’t want to have a lot of chit-chat about superficial things. But this night gets so serious so quickly.”

And yet while calculating the vibe, Piña’s restlessness conveys not insecurity, but confidence and self-assurance compared to Angela, who all but unravels at the seams while trying to impress her: “All of these things: touching things and she’s hiding the vaping. She didn’t even ask if she could vape in the house, but she’s also having a chewing gum on and off all the time. Then I had M&Ms, then I had the glasses, I had a lot of props, the olives—especially in the first part of the movie, I’m always using something,” says Cruz. “It was just the energy that I was feeling, that she was feeling like today is going to be a big night.”

Piña’s cocktail of sexiness and sensibility provides the awakening that Angela and Joe need. This dynamic echoes in her equally electrifying turn in the historical romantic epic La Bola Negra, out in theatres this week after winning the People’s Choice Award at TIFF. In La Bola Negra, Cruz steals the show with a brief but memorable appearance as Nené, a cabaret singer and prostitute who teaches gay soldier Sebastián (Guitarricadelafuente) what it means to love in an authentic way, much like Piña does for Angela and Joe. It’s remarkable to see how distinctly Cruz captures the vitality and bravery of these two liberated women in different eras.

“They’re both fighting for freedom and for truth, and one is more free to do it because where she lives, and when, [it] is actually allowed. And with [La Bola Negra], she’s almost telling Guitarrica’s character as a secret, that there is a place where maybe he can be himself and he can be free,” observes Cruz.

“If you compare it, it’s very sad to see how very similar women, in that way, in their souls, have something that could be very similar,” continues Cruz. “They are living in different times where one is allowed to say what she feels and the other one has to stay [silent] or they will kill her. So that is actually a very moving comparison for me.”

Cruz admits she hadn’t made the connection between the characters, but always approached The Invite and La Bola Negra differently simply due to the distinct nature of the projects and characters. “They are so different in terms of personality that I never worried about that,” she says. “I knew they were never going to be similar, but they cannot express it the same way.”