![]() “The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, ‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,’ ” she wrote. In a 2017 essay in The New York Times, she described bringing the project to Miramax cofounder (and now convicted sex offender) Harvey Weinstein, and the years of bullying that followed: demands for sex, fits of rage. ![]() It wasn’t until 15 years later that Hayek revealed the full level of torment she’d experienced to get the film made. “It’s the difference between someone who reads all the books and someone who lives the life.” That struggle imbued Hayek’s performance with “an authenticity” that no other person could have provided, Molina says. Hayek fought for years, against sizable odds, to realize her cinematic vision of Kahlo. Hayek produced the film and starred in it with Alfred Molina, who played Kahlo’s husband, famed muralist Diego Rivera. In 2002, Hayek’s passion project came to life: Frida, the story of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. ![]() But I wish we could find a space where people feel, My voice also has to do with you, and your voice also has to do with me.” Like, ‘We’ve got the Latino box checked we’ve got the African American box checked.’ It’s an acknowledgment that these voices are important, and that I applaud. But for the most part, they’re segregated in boxes. There are more opportunities now for non-white and non-Anglo people in Hollywood, she says, “and that’s good. But thank you for allowing me to pay my rent.’ ” They also gave me the humbleness to say, ‘OK, it’s not going to advance my career. “And so, even the bad movies gave me so much. “I learned every single day from every single person on the crew,” she notes. The actress persevered, taking any role that came her way and making the most of her time on set. Small roles led to a break playing Antonio Banderas’ love interest in Desperado (1995), though Hayek’s options were limited by narrow-minded Hollywood suits who told her that, because of her accent, she could be cast only as a prostitute, a drug dealer or a domestic. Before long, she was getting cast for her first U.S. “And since I hadn’t had to do anything on my own in Mexico, I was a spoiled brat!” But Hayek worked diligently on her English and learned the ropes of the industry. “I didn’t speak English, I didn’t have a green card, I didn’t know I had to have an agent, I couldn’t drive, I was dyslexic,” she once recalled. ![]() Two years later, she moved to Los Angeles in hopes of pursuing a career in film. “And, obviously, within my own family.”Īt 22, she won the lead in the 1989 telenovela Teresa and became a national sensation. “I grew up very enriched by different cultures, even within my own country,” she says. It was a privileged existence in many ways. Hayek grew up in Veracruz, Mexico, the daughter of an opera singer with Spanish roots and an oil-company executive of Lebanese heritage. Beneath her cascade of black hair, there is an openness about Hayek, an apparent comfort with who she is at this stage in her life: a wife, a mother, founder of her own production company and a skilled actor still in demand. Speaking over Zoom from Los Angeles in July, she wears chunky black-framed glasses. Her career, launched in Mexico and then established, in spite of challenges, in Hollywood, has brought her to a place where she can call the shots as an actress, producer and director. Time has been kind to Hayek, but she has fought for everything she has attained. The film, last summer’s loud and raucous shoot-’em-up, is additionally, Hayek says, “a love story about staying in love, not just falling in love.” To put a finer point on it, she asks, “How do you adapt your love to the different versions of yourself as you go through time?” But Sonia also grapples with the midlife issues of how a woman’s body changes with time and what that means. Her black-leather-clad, gun-toting badass in Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard cusses like a stevedore and wields a machine gun with one hand. “When I was going through menopause myself, I wondered, How come nobody talks about this in the movies?” says Hayek, 55, with a chuckle. Jackson), in a film that focused on her story, she had one condition: Her character had to be on intimate terms with the hot flashes and mood swings known to women in their 40s and 50s. So, when Salma Hayek was asked to reprise the role of Sonia, wife to a hit man (Samuel L. En español | In Hollywood no one flinches at making movies about murder, global annihilation or zombie cannibalism, but one subject strikes fear into the hearts of producers and directors: menopause.
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