De la Reguera, 34, is well-known in her native Mexico through her work in films, plays and telenovelas. But she’s beginning to make inroads in Hollywood. Her biggest starring roles to date have been in 2006’s Jack Black wrestling comedy “Nacho Libre,” 2010’s “Cop Out” with Tracy Morgan and Season 2 of HBO’s “Eastbound & Down,” where she played Danny McBride’s love interest.
This summer, her profile gets bumped further with July’s blockbuster “Cowboys & Aliens,” starring Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford. The genre mash-up pits 19th-century Arizona gunslingers against invaders from space.
“I knew it was going to be huge. Why haven’t they come out with this type of movie before?” de la Reguera asks. “It has so many attractive ingredients.”
Among them is the woman Esquire magazine called the “most impossibly beautiful woman” in its July 2010 issue. De la Reguera plays Maria, a saloonkeeper and wife of Sam Rockwell. But Ford also made an impression on her.
“He was the first person I met at the screen test,” she says of the Hollywood legend. “I wasn’t intimidated with him. He’s very normal. He has such a sense of humor. They were trying all these [cowboy] hats on him to see what looked best.”
(Ford reportedly wanted to go hatless to avoid looking like his Indiana Jones character, but executive producer Steven Spielberg persuaded him to don a different style of fedora.)
If the movie is a smash as expected, de la Reguera hopes she can bypass one of the most crushing aspects of show business: endless auditions.
“I’d love to be able to have people know me better, so I get more work and I don’t have to be knocking on that many doors every day,” she says.
Oh, and for anyone residing in LA, where de la Reguera has lived for five years, she’s single, having just broken up with a longtime boyfriend four months ago. “I think it’s really difficult to date here if you don’t have a regular job,” she says. “I haven’t gotten that many dates or people asking me out.”
