Penelope Cruz is prepared to go this far: she'll concede that she was pregnant during the shooting of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, but don't expect her to say much more about her personal life.
She's also prepared to reveal that director Rob Marshall had to be careful with camera angles because of her expanding midriff. And yes, her pirate costumes were something of a challenge for the wardrobe department.
"They had to do a few adjustments for me over the months," she admits cautiously in her softly accented English. But she did love wearing the outfits, even when they had to conceal her approaching motherhood.
"For a character so far away from our own reality and nowadays, they really helped me to imagine what a pirate would have been like in those times. It really helped to get into those boots and those clothes and those locations."
It's interesting to watch the 36-year-old Cruz draw a line in the sand when talking to reporters. There was a time when her English was less confident and she was more hesitant in her media sessions. But now she has the necessary confidence and has no trouble making it clear there are some things she doesn't want to talk about.
Things like her marriage to fellow Spanish actor Javier Bardem, and her son Leo, who was born in January.
Things like the new Woody Allen movie she's about to start filming in July.
Still, it's questions about her private life that especially raise the barriers. Reporters routinely ask actresses about the joys of parenting -but they needn't bother with this lady.
"I have a rule of not talking about my family in interviews." Cruz is polite but firm. "I don't have a problem with saying I am very happy, because I am, but I don't want to give details of our life. It is important, I think, from the beginning, to maintain that privacy and separate it from my work. For me, that's sacred."
She doesn't mind talking about her work, but again, she makes the rules. In the case of Woody Allen, who wrote and directed her into an Academy Award for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, she's tight-lipped about the plot of Bop Decameron, their new project together.
"Hmm ..." she responds when pressed to discuss it. "He doesn't want us to talk about the film or the character, so I will respect that."
We do know that it co-stars Jesse Eisenberg and Ellen Page -but not much more. And Cruz does concede that she's looking forward to working with Woody again.
"We're going to shoot in Rome in July. I can't wait to be around him again, because he makes me laugh so much."
Furthermore, she's grateful for what Vicki Cristina Barcelona did for the Hollywood side of her career.
"It gave me a great experience making it, along with the privilege of working with Woody Allen, whom I first admired as a little girl. I've seen all his movies, so just to be around him, to spend time with him, to work with him. ... It also gave me an Oscar, so it's a very special movie for me."
She's intensely loyal to friends and colleagues. Allen is one example. Johnny Depp, who's back as Capt. Jack Sparrow in On Stranger Tides, is another. The two previously worked together in Blow more than a decade ago, and she adores him.
"He was already a big star when I worked with him the first time, and he just kept growing and growing in every way and evolving. He just gets better and better every day. And he's an amazing human being.
When you spend a lot of time with him and see how he is with his friends and his family, with everybody he works with, he's an example in so many ways. He's really humble. He's really smart, and I only have great things to say about him."
She remains astonished by her career successes -astonished that she starred in a Hollywood blockbuster like Pirates, astonished that someone like Woody Allen wants to work with her, astonished by her Spanish-language triumphs with awardwinning director Pedro Almodovar.
"I didn't imagine any of this," she stresses. "I just wanted to work as an actress or a dancer. And every night, I was praying, please, to have a job that was not boring, a job that was inspiring, to wake up every day and to be able to go and spend my hours of that day doing a job that I liked. That was my wish. So when that became true, and much, much more happened that didn't even cross my mind then -it didn't seem possible, no."
Hers is a trans-Atlantic career, so she and Bardem keep homes in both their native Spain and the United States. That much she'll tell us. Also, she ends up confiding that she's not that domestic, although she can do some things in the kitchen.
"I know how to do a few Spanish dishes, a few Italian dishes. Everything I know how to cook is from my mother. I'm not a great cook, but I know how to do a few things."
As for the secret of looking so great at the Oscar ceremonies only weeks after giving birth: "I didn't go on any strange diets. My diet is the Mediterranean diet, which is very healthy if you eat well -and I eat well. I've also danced for 17 years, although I have to push myself to do it."
