Paz Vega has never worried about taking the typical route to Hollywood stardom, but with four English-language movies on the way, global stardom is knocking on her door

Quite what Paz Vega likes about the name ‘Orson’ I can’t say. But it obviously does something for the Spanish star. Married for five years to Venezuelan restaurateur Orson Salazar, she named their one year-old son after his father too. Now she has an affair with Orson Welles – on screen at least – in her new film Fade to Black. She plays Italian actress Lea Padovani, who becomes romantically embroiled with the legendary actor-director (played by Danny Huston) while he’s in Rome shooting the 1948 film Black Magic. But with Welles on the rebound after being rejected by Rita Hayworth, don’t expect theirs to be a hearts and flowers romance. “I think like many, many love stories, it starts with a bad beginning!” laughs Vega.

While her sultry dark hair and eyes lend her some resemblance to the 1930s diva, Vega claims she knew little of Padovani – who did, in reality, have a brief fling with Welles after he cast her as Desdemona in a version of Othello he intended to make. “She’s not beautiful like Sofia Loren, but she’s very strong and sensual. I tried to put this into the character.” Likewise, the Seville-raised Vega didn’t know too much about Welles beyond the fact he made Citizen Kane. “But I knew that he loved Spain and our culture – he loved bullfighting,” she offers. “And he’s buried in the south of Spain, in a beautiful city [Ronda, Malaga] where I spent all my summers with my family.”

 For Vega, the daughter of a matador herself, making another film in English adds further weight to an international career that has already seen her act opposite Adam Sander in Spanglish. Curiously, the 2004 film gave her an ‘introducing’ credit, despite the fact it was the thirteenth movie on a CV that had already seen her work with such illustrious Spanish directors as Julio Medem (Sex and Lucia) and Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her). “I never thought before about coming to the States to do a movie because I didn’t speak English,” she admits. “After Spanglish, I went back to Spain, but people called me from Hollywood and said, ‘You have to come here. There are jobs for you!’”

Three years “of going back and forth” – which included making the Morgan Freeman comedy 10 Items or Less – and with a much improved level of English, Vega has begun to firmly establish herself in the US.  So much so, she only took three months off after giving birth last May. “I had a pretty good pregnancy and after that, the recovery period was good,” she says. It meant she was back at work by September, by which point she and her husband decided to make the move to Los Angeles permanent. “It was difficult in the beginning. But now I’m very happy. I feel very good in LA. I have a lot of work, so it’s like an adventure, a new beginning. I’m 32, so I feel like I have another goal.”

Since then, Vega has not stopped working. She has four English-language movies on the way and, she’s happy to report, they’re all very different. In kidnap thriller Not Forgotten, she plays a mother in a Tex-Mex border town while in The Six Wives of Henry LeFay, a “crazy comedy” with Tim Allen, she is a “tough” businesswoman. Then in drama The Human Contact, which marks the directorial debut of Will Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett-Smith, she plays a free-spirited art dealer who begins an affair with Jason Clarke’s tortured executive. “It’s very sexual,” says Vega. “I don’t think it’s a romance – it’s not an easy movie to watch.”

Read the full interview in our September 2008 edition.