Eva Mendes isn’t looking to return to acting anytime soon after leaving the industry about a decade ago.
“I don’t really miss it,” Mendes told me when we caught up at West Hollywood’s Ardor restaurant, where she hosted a brunch to celebrate her new co-ownership of kitchen cleaning product company Skura Style.
“I got tired fighting for the good roles,” she said. “There just was a point where I thought, ‘I’m going to create my own opportunities and become a producer on things and create my own material,’ but it just didn’t feel worth it to me.”
Not long after, she and partner Ryan Gosling started their family. They’re parents to daughters Esmeralda, 7, and Amanda, 6. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is what I’m supposed to do right now,’” Mendes said.
“There are more opportunities for Latina actresses now, but when I bowed out 10 years ago I wasn’t being offered things that weren’t specifically Latina,” she added. “It is exciting that things are different now, so who knows what I will do in the future. But right now, I’m keeping it in the home with my kids.”
And focusing on Skura Style. “In all seriousness, I don’t know if it’s a Cuban thing or what it is, but I love a clean kitchen,” Mendes said. “I love a clean house. That doesn’t mean my house is always clean at all. What it means is when I have a clean kitchen and a clean house, that is like mental wellness for me.”
She remembers her mom cleaning every weekend. “I grew up in an apartment with five of us in a small one bedroom, one bath,” Mendes said. “She would put on Cuban music and I would smell the Pine Sol. It wouldn’t say clean for long, but those couple of days would make me feel better and we were all in a better mood. It started then and I bring it into my house today. I have two little girls, and that kitchen sink is always full. I don’t know if I’ve made myself love it, but to me it is meditative to wash the dishes and to feel the suds. I have a dishwasher, but I hardly every use it.”
She was introduced to Skura sponges during the early days of the pandemic. “Like so many people, I was cleaning like a freak and overly doing it,” Mendes recalled. “I ordered a bunch of sponges, but Skura stood out to me. The fact that it has the fade to change technology and it’s made out of polyurethane and not cellulose and it doesn’t hold onto bacteria.”
