Eiza González Has the Range

Look, Eiza González would not recommend getting cheated on. She definitely doesn’t advise getting cheated on in what one could call a spectacularly mortifying fashion. She would know: Back when she was a teen idol—the star of a super-popular telenovela doing double-duty as a recording artist; basically Mexico’s Hannah Montana—she found out that her boyfriend had made a sex tape with someone else. She says that she found out about his infidelity at the same time as the rest of the world: from “the cover of a magazine.” 

“It was hilarious,” she says now. And she is laughing—big, throwing-her-head-back laughs—because that was half a lifetime ago. Now she is 34 years old. She is starring in 3 Body Problem, a sci-fi epic series from Game of Thrones masterminds D.B. Weiss and David Benioff (and co-showrunner Alexander Woo), which premieres on Netflix March 21, and in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a Guy Ritchie action-comedy flick about the creation of the British special forces during WWII, in theaters April 19. She is Zooming in from a luxe hotel room in Southeast Asia where she’s staying while shooting Fountain of Youth, another Ritchie feature, alongside Natalie Portman, whom González describes as “my idol.” 

But! We’re skipping ahead. Back to the cheating scandal, which isn’t even the real story. The story is what came next.

Distraught and humiliated, González left Mexico City for Los Angeles, crashing with a friend in a one-bedroom rental. She went out every single day for two weeks straight, “just partying and crying, partying and crying, partying and crying,” and then González got a call from her mom: Had she heard of IMDbPro? (The paid version of the site you check mid-movie to answer the question, where do I know her from? is used by industry insiders to connect with talent.) 

By this point, González had been working in Mexico as an actor and singer for 10 years. She’d studied at The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York City—famous for teaching students the Method technique; alums include Claire Danes, Angelina Jolie, and Marilyn Monroe—where she’d learned that she would need an agent and a manager before anyone in Hollywood would touch her. Despite González’s insistence that it would accomplish nothing, her mother updated her profile. You know how moms can be: annoying, and also, right. Through her zhuzhed profile page, González landed some auditions, including one for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But, nobody bit, so González went back to Mexico.

She was on a modeling gig—a bridal photo shoot—about 6 weeks later when she got a call from casting director Mary Vernieu (whose CV included Any Given Sunday and Cruel Intentions) asking González to read for Robert Rodriguez, who was making a television series based on his film franchise, From Dusk Till Dawn. With a jacket thrown over a wedding gown, González put herself on tape and booked her first Hollywood job: as Santanico Pandemonium, the part first made famous by Salma Hayek. A few years later, González won her breakout role in Baby Driver, the hyper-stylized heist movie that would go on to make more than $220 million worldwide on its $34 million budget and score three Oscar nominations. 

“And then it all happened,” González says, gesturing toward the career she’s had since, the Rolex she bought for herself after booking Baby Driver glittering on her wrist, a Bulgari choker (she was named the brand’s first Latina ambassador nearly three years ago) gleaming around her neck. “It all stemmed from my boyfriend cheating on me with a sex tape. What are the odds?”

In fact, the odds, once you get to know González, seem higher than average. Her acting origin story is rooted in what González calls “the most tragic thing that has ever happened to me:” the death of her father in a motorcycle accident when she was only 12. That same year, she lost all of her grandparents. To keep the young, grieving González preoccupied, her mother enrolled her in an assortment of extracurriculars: dancing, painting, acting. “It was really weird, because I was in the saddest part of my life,” González says. “But I was the happiest I’ve ever been.” 

Although González was a sharp student who loved economics—her father had wanted her to attend Harvard or Yale; her mother, a former model, was the “anti-stage-mom”—she decided to drop out of school to pursue acting. “It just clicked,” she says. “The moment that I was acting and the moment that I was singing and the moment that I was on that stage, I was more alive than ever.” Just as she was turning 15, González landed the lead in Lola, Érase una Vez (Lola: Once Upon a Time), the telenovela that launched her career in Mexico. 

In her more than two decades as an actor, González has developed a formidable repertoire of skills: She’s acted in English and in Spanish; she’ll be speaking with a British accent and singing in German in Ministry; she’s training in Muay Thai and learning bamboo-stick twirls and tricks for Fountain of Youth. But her specialty seems to be something deeper: a preternatural ability to alchemize her pain, to forge a path through trauma with her work. 

Acting did not eradicate her heartache. But it gave her a space in which she could, through transforming into other characters, be completely herself. When performing, “I’m living all the feelings I want to live,” she says. “I’m ridden with fear, but I welcome the fear. It’s the only time in my life that the fear feels friendly.” 

She jokes that she feels “like I’ve lived 20 lives” already, given how much she’s been through. “[But] every time that something tragic happens to me, I never complain about it,” she says. “Because every single time that something really tragic has happened, something amazing has happened right afterwards.”

Chances are you know González as a bombshell. In Baby Driver, she’s a sexy, crazy-in-love criminal. In From Dusk Till Dawn, she is a sultry, bikini-wearing vampire queen, pouring tequila down a man’s throat with her foot. In the press, she has been linked to a smattering of high-profile men—Liam Hemsworth, Timothée Chalamet, Jason Momoa—and labeled, essentially, as the Smoking Hot Girlfriend. 

It’s been a surreal experience for someone who, as a teenage star, felt ripped apart by the Mexican press for not being pretty enough; who has struggled on and off with disordered eating since adolescence; who calls being paparazzied on the beach, the cellulite on her ass exposed for all to see, the most terrifying moment of her life. “I went through a lot of trouble with my body, with my curves, with my look,” she says. “It was really tough.”

She does not think that the perception of her as “sexy”—a label that sounds, at first, like a compliment, but, in reality, flattens her into a one-dimensional person, as if “sexiness” is the only attribute she possesses—can be separated from the treatment of Latinas in the entertainment industry at large. “I just think it's an overly sexualized idea of a Latin woman,” she says. “It's so disappointing and it's so pathetic.” Getting out of the bombshell box, she adds, “has been single-handedly the biggest challenge of my career.” Though she is loath to point this out, “None of my white friends who were in the industry were getting that. It was just me.”

“I remember being [told for] so many projects, ‘She’s too pretty for the role. She’s too hot for the role,’” says González. “Then I’d just be like, What is Margot Robbie? She’s the hottest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life!” 

Even though she doesn’t believe any of this is really about her, “I had an identity crisis for a very long time,” she says. “I was like, Do I shave my head? Do I make myself less attractive? Do I make myself more attractive? Do I not dress super-hot or do I dress super-hot or do I cover myself all the time?”

Over the past few years, González has fought for opportunities to show her depth and range beyond such superficial considerations. In the vicious 2020 comedy I Care A Lot, she’s Rosamund Pike’s sardonic partner in eldercare-crime; in 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, she’s a tough-but-funny top executive. In 3 Body Problem, González plays Auggie, an applied scientist running a nanotechnology research center. 

Pike bonded swiftly with González on the I Care A Lot set. González “is extremely funny and quick to laugh — and just a gorgeous, fun, amusing, self-deprecating [person],” says Pike. “And also warm. She lets you in. She lets you into the real person, which lots of people in this business do and many of the people in this business don’t, and it’s fine. People sometimes put up protective barriers, and Eiza does not.”

Given Pike’s age and experience, she feels “a slight element of mentorship” in their dynamic; she understood “the expectation of [González] as the bombshell, as you put it,” Pike tells me during our Zoom interview, “and knowing there’s other things to offer, and the challenge of waiting, when the offers to be the bombshell keep coming, having the kind of grit to say ‘no’ and wait for something that allows you to show another color—that’s the endless challenge of the film industry, isn’t it? …So we talked quite a lot about that, quite openly, because what if you take a risk and people don’t like it? Or what if you take a risk and you fail?”

Pike is also an executive producer on 3 Body Problem—she and her partner acquired the rights to the book before she’d even met González—and is delighted to see her friend (whom she jokingly calls “my wife”) play Auggie. “It’s fun to see Eiza as a physicist, isn’t it? She loves to learn.”

“Auggie is loosely based on two characters from the books, but she is very much a fresh creation — much of which came from Eiza's own strengths and personality,” Benioff, Weiss, and Woo tell InStyle via email. “There isn't nearly as much a science ‘type’ as Hollywood would lead you to believe. Scientists can be sardonic, quick witted, funny, passionate. We think Eiza's performance will help broaden the conception of what scientists are like.”

González was hesitant, at first, to sign on to a series, the first season of which would take a year to shoot. But she convinced Weiss and Benioff to let her read all eight scripts, “which is crazy,” she says, “because no one read the scripts but me until we started filming.” Three episodes in, she was sold. The narrative is complex: Stories play out in different timelines and locations, including in virtual reality, and their connections are not immediately evident. When audiences meet the brilliant, tormented Auggie, she is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I’ve never read something like this,” González says.

On set, the showrunners write, it’s obvious that González “has been doing this full-time since she was very young… Between takes she is relaxed and fun to be around, drinking coffee and talking shit…but when they call ‘action,’ the switch flips. Having to shoot 15 pages a day when you're [a teenager] can give you that facility.”

“She is a lifer,” they say. “She is a carny. She is a pro. She knows what the camera is doing, and knows when a moment feels real and when it doesn't.”

González is respected for her hard-won skill and experience now, but it wasn’t always that way. When González was first working in the U.S., she was dismayed to find that critics, the press, industry insiders, all treated her as though she’d never acted a day in her life, even though she had a decade of work under her belt. “That was shocking because—and I don't mean it in a way [of] no one knew who I was. No, no, no. When I started working in America,” González recalls, “it was like, ‘So, how is it to be a beginning actress?’ And it was just embarrassing because…I was like, What am I going to say? ‘By the way, I'm successful in another country.’ ”

She knew it would be a challenge, making it here. But she was stunned by the scale of the industry’s bias against international talent, particularly women of color, even for those who were already stars before they came to Hollywood (see also: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Michelle Yeoh).  “But it was so discerning because it was dismissive of my entire career. It was dismissive of who I was. It was dismissive of my culture. It was dismissive of my experience, my work, my work ethic,” says González. “Because you are uneducated and uninformed about other countries, that's on you and that's fine, but you cannot dismiss people's careers."

One week before our conversation, González turned 34. She’d had some anxiety about her birthday this year, partly because she’s never been one to celebrate her birthday at all—chalk it up to the lingering pain of being “kind of a loser” at school who always felt, how embarrassing if I do a party, no one’s going to come—and partly due to feelings about hitting her mid-thirties, and what that meant for her life. Something about reaching this stage made her ask herself: Where should I be? What should I be doing? Where do I envision myself? She was in a downer loop, ruminating on all these thoughts.

To her surprise, “It was the most wonderful birthday, probably, I’ve ever had,” she says. Because González was traveling for work, she wound up having a succession of birthday parties across the globe: first in LA, then in London with friends and again at a dinner thrown by Casa Azul Spirits (she’s an investor and face of the brand). 

A week into being a 34-year-old, González is feeling at ease and satisfied, “happy with the people that I’ve brought into my life” and free from the ones she’s cut loose in the name of growth. Plus, “Shockingly, I like myself so much more physically right now than I did in my twenties,” she says. “And a part of it, obviously, is maturing and accepting yourself and doing all the hard work, but I also think I look better. I actually think I'm aging into my looks in a way that I personally like.”

With the back-to-back releases of 3 Body Problem and Ministry, González feels like she’s on the verge of being seen as the woman she actually is: someone with real range. (She thinks audiences who see both projects will be asking themselves, Wait a second. This is the same person?) She’s also excited to act in Spanish again in Hulu’s La Máquina, alongside Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. "I dreamed to have the career that Diego and Gael are having," she says. “Being able to work with them was really special.”

González is in a season of her life when she is dating for keeps. She’s “dying to have kids” and evaluates prospective partners on their co-parenting potential (and, preparing for a worst-case scenario, how they’d behave in a divorce: “Would we have good communication?”). That is, she would be dating for keeps, if she were dating at all. “I’ve sort of given up,” she says. “I’m not looking anymore.” 

She has thrown herself fully into love before, carrying out all those grand gestures you’d do for somebody you’re wild about: taking the 1:00 a.m. flight straight from work just to spend 24 hours with someone; staying on FaceTime the entire night just to watch that person sleep. “I am telling you: When I'm in love, I fall in love so deep and it takes me so much to get over,” she says. “And the older I get, it's harder for me because I don't play around. I go in and I give it all. I am not going to half-ass anything.”

Dating within the industry presents its own challenges. In the past three years, González’s itinerant lifestyle has had her living for long but impermanent stretches in London, New Zealand, Turkey, and Spain; she’s been on three continents in the past two weeks. An actor in the prime of his career is “never going to take a back step for me,” she says. “I’m going to have to follow them, and they’re sort of dictating the rhythm.” This gendered disparity is compounded by the wage gap: “You have kids…and this actor is getting paid $20 million, and you get $2 million. He's going to be like, ‘Well, you can go do that movie.’” 

At work, González prides herself on being “a game girl,” down for anything a director asks. “I’m incredibly adaptable,” she says, calling it her “superpower.” In her personal life, she likes to be open, too. “But I definitely have a list of non-negotiables.” She leans close to the screen. “If you've not gone to therapy,” she says, “I'm not dating you.”

González has been in therapy since she was young, a process she initially resisted. “I didn't want to talk about my feelings, because I was in shock and I was traumatized, and I couldn't bear the fact that my father had died.” Within a few years, she quit. Through her acting studies, though, she discovered that “the introspective work is never-ending” and she’d need to “face the monster” to become the performer she wanted to be. She started therapy again in her early twenties and never stopped. 

“Everyone needs therapy,” she says. “Therapy is the most normal [thing]! The concept of this prefixed negative idea about therapy is nuts to me. I think therapy is just the healthiest thing anyone could do.” 

She still calls herself a “hopeless romantic,” even though she bears the scars of past heartbreak on her skin, literally. A tour of her tattoos leads us to a heart on her finger, a symbol she shared “with a boyfriend at one point, who is now non-existing.” She mocks its delicate, once-trendy aesthetic: “It’s very 2001.” 

But on her other hand is a phrase she tattooed not too long ago. Something her father always said about her: She’s a force to be reckoned with.

“So I can always remember my dear father’s thoughts,” she says, grinning. “About how crazy I was.”