The young actor told him to stop: "I said to him I would be a vase or a lampshade if he wanted, facing a wall or whatever," she remembers now. The film was Talk to Her and Almodóvar was not exaggerating. Anaya's part is so small that when her father went to the premiere, he didn't even notice she was in it.
A decade on, Almodóvar called again. The intervening years had been good to both of them: Almodóvar had evolved his lurid, exuberant early films into subtler and more profound later work; Talk to Her won an Oscar and he continued to move from art house to our house with Volver and Broken Embraces. Anaya, meanwhile, had been building her reputation with fearless performances in films such as Sex and Lucia and Room in Rome, and gently infiltrating the mainstream in Van Helsing and Mesrine.
Now, Almodóvar said he had another part that would be perfect for Anaya, and this time it was the lead female role in an adaptation of a trashy 1984 French novella, Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, which the director had been working on for years. "My entire blood stopped for a few seconds," says Anaya. "I couldn't believe it. Everything was part of a dream and I am still inside the dream now."
Open-minded
"Elena's main feature is how far she can go in the most compromising scenes, I mean physically," says Almodóvar. "She is very good at difficulties and tension. She's very open-minded, the word ‘risk' is part of her work. This is why I picked her."
Being an Almodóvar woman is a highly coveted position in world cinema. He creates particularly evocative and emotionally rich female characters— Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and, perhaps most famously, Penelope Cruz.
So Anaya would join this illustrious company in the new film, The Skin I Live In. The reality struck the 36-year-old from Palencia in northern Spain immediately. "As soon as Pedro tells you, ‘It's you!', all these scary thoughts come into your head," she says. "You start to feel this incredible responsibility. You think: I have to do this well. I won't lie to you, it's completely terrifying."
When Anaya was 18 she went to Madrid to audition for drama school, but instead landed the lead in her first feature, Africa. That was half her life ago, and she has worked consistently ever since. "But it doesn't get any easier," she says. "That first film I was scared and nervous because I didn't study acting at school, but at the same time I was 18. Now I'm not, and every day it is harder and harder."
The Skin I Live In follows a suave plastic surgeon, Dr Robert Ledgard, played by another Almodovar favourite, Antonio Banderas, whose wife was badly burnt in a car crash. He becomes obsessed with how he could have saved her and starts to develop a heat-and disease-resistant transgenic skin that is still sensitive to the human touch. Twelve years on, he succeeds, but he needs a human guinea pig to test it on, and this is where Anaya's character Vera comes in.
There may be echoes of Frankenstein but it emerges that Dr Ledgard is attempting to create something more finessed with Vera: he wants the frail beauty of a human but with supernatural powers. "Vera is like a doll, the perfect woman who never loved him," says Anaya. "But she has to be an incredible actor. Every day she has to do a performance, she can't give him a clue that she is planning to cheat him and escape from this jail."
Before the shoot, the director gave her an esoteric selection of references including films such as Babyface and Double Indemnity, Alice Munro's short-story collection Runaway and the autobiographies of Janet Frame, who spent a decade in psychiatric hospitals before being acknowledged as one of New Zealand's greatest authors. The message, it seems, is that he saw Vera as a survivor.
"I could talk to you for hours about the notes he gave me," says Anaya. "With Pedro, you don't build up your own role. You have to almost go through his mind to get to the character. Every little moment he directs you and you have to be obedient and quick to follow his path to wherever he wants to take you."
Almodóvar, for his part, has said he is delighted by the intensity she brought to the role: "I'm very happy with Elena's performance because I think it was the most complex to do."
Reservation
Almodóvar says that Anaya is part of "the family" now, and it is clear that she loves being one of his women. The pair have become friends and are regular companions in the front row of fashion shows and courtside watching Rafa Nadal.
"Pedro is somebody I would like to have close in my life," she says. Anaya's only reservation is the extra attention she has started to attract since The Skin I Live In premiered in Cannes in May.
"It's true that you become more famous, which is the worst part of it in a way, because I think that privacy is a right that all humans should have."
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