Eva Mendes
Before she became a name, Eva Mendes was the girl in the music videos—Aerosmith, Will Smith, Pet Shop Boys. Then she broke into film at exactly the right moment to become a defining screen presence of the 2000s multiplex.
Born March 5, 1974, in Miami to Cuban parents, Eva Mendes spent the mid-1990s to early 2000s as the girl in the background of music videos, a role that gave her face cultural currency without a name to go with it: Pet Shop Boys' 'Se a vida é' (1996), Aerosmith's 'Hole in My Soul' (1997), Will Smith's 'Miami' (1998), and later The Strokes' 'The End Has No End' (2004). She was everywhere, and nowhere, a ghost in the MTV machine.
Training Day (2001) was the pivot—opposite Denzel Washington, she played the mistress of his corrupt narcotics detective, the role that put her on Hollywood's map. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003) put her front and center as customs agent Monica Fuentes in a film that grossed over $236 million worldwide and made her a household name among the Friday-night rental crowd. Hitch (2005), opposite Will Smith, was the romantic-comedy peak—the film USA Today would later cite as her best screen role to date. She moved between genres seamlessly: Ghost Rider (2007) grossed over $228 million; the same year she went dramatic in We Own the Night, showing the emotional range that studio films often didn't ask of her.
The Other Guys (2010) cast her as Dr. Sheila Gamble, the impossibly glamorous wife of Will Ferrell's schlubby cop, the joke being that no one could believe they were married. The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) drew some of her best notices, a performance critics called quietly heartbreaking—proof that she had range beyond the roles Hollywood had been handing her. She was also a Calvin Klein model and became a Revlon international spokeswoman in 2005, her face as omnipresent in beauty aisles as it was on movie screens.
Her last film was Lost River (2014). She has been with Ryan Gosling since 2011 (two daughters, born 2014 and 2016) and stepped away from acting on her own terms. In 2022, she said she'd gotten tired of fighting for good roles, which is its own kind of truth: the 2000s were her moment—the era of DVD shelves, FHM/Maxim covers, Friday-night rentals, and Eva Mendes popcorn-multiplex stardom. When that decade ended, so did that particular chapter of her life.
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