Everything about Eva Mendes is larger than life.

The Hollywood actress has a big movie star personality, a throaty laugh that is surprisingly booming and a voluptuous figure which launched her career.

“I’m very in touch with my sensuality as a woman and not afraid to use it, you know, in my work,” she says, her brassy voice filling the private dining room of the Hyatt On The Bund hotel, where she is fielding questions as the face – and body – of Calvin Klein.

“I don’t shy away from it but I have a lot of facets to my personality,” she adds.

“I have the sexy aspect and I have the more serious aspect; I have the business woman aspect, I have the goofy daughter aspect, you know, we all wear many hats.”

The 36-year-old actress’ body of work, so to speak, includes movies such as the comedy Hitch with Will Smith, action flick 2 Fast 2 Furious and, most recently, The Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call – New Orleans in which she stars opposite Nicolas Cage.

She is also fronting the latest Calvin Klein ads for underwear and jeans with a series of traffic-stopping images.

However, this current campaign is decidedly tame, compared to the controversial TV commercial she filmed for Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession perfume two years ago.

Shot by famed lensman Steven Meisel, the black-and-white shoot saw Mendes writhing pleasurably in bed alone, exposing her right breast and nipple, and was banned by TV stations in the United States.

On that suggestive ad, which subsequently went viral on the Internet, she says:

“It’s part of my job as an artist to provoke thought and make some people mad and make some people happy.

“As long as people are feeling something, I’ve done my job. If they’re not talking at all, that’s a problem.”

That amazing body has also appeared nude in Flaunt magazine and Vogue Italy and was used in a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals anti-fur campaign with the tagline “Fur? I’d rather go naked”.

In person, though, there is little of that smouldering sexuality you see on screen.

Instead, she is prone to extravagant hand gestures, crossing and uncrossing her spindly legs every few minutes and throwing her head back in raucous chuckles.

More than once, she whips out her mobile phone from her slim clutch to show off photos of her dog, Hugo, and the kids in the hospital where she does volunteer work back home in Los Angeles.

She may have a sexpot image but she is quick to state that she is “first and foremost an actress”.

“I love acting. I’ve been acting for 11 years and I still study. I love my craft and I work very hard at my craft,” she says, adding that she takes intensive acting workshops with an acting coach.

The performance in sultry underwear ads, for her, is all “just like being another character”.

“Something happened to me once I got all oiled up in the Calvin Klein underwear and jeans,” she says, flailing her limbs about. “I don’t know what happened, it just took over and I became that person that you see there and I was moving in certain ways that I had never done before.”

Her career path is ironic, given that she once harboured aspirations to become a nun. Mendes was raised a Roman Catholic by her Cuban parents, who migrated to Miami before she was born. After her parents divorced, her mum raised her in Los Angeles, where Mendes worked her way up from commercials to music videos for Aerosmith and Pet Shop Boys before making it big on the silver screen.

Teased as a kid for having buck teeth – she still has a toothy grin that is seldom captured in her posed photos – she says: “I grew up with Calvin Klein ads and campaigns and images. Kate Moss was a big deal for me and my friends when we were tweens. We were little wannabe Kate Mosses running around.

“She was definitely an edgier-looking model, not conventionally beautiful, but she had her own kind of beauty. I remember feeling empowered by that.”

Quoting Oscar Wilde, she adds: “Indifference is the revenge that the world takes on mediocrities, that’s what it is. For me, it is important to be anything but mediocre.”

This article was first published in Urban, The Straits Times.