Salma Hayek Pinault: “I was typecast for a long time. ‘You’re sexy, so you’re not allowed to have a sense of humour.’” (original) (raw)

“Let me tell you something,” says Salma Hayek Pinault, leaning towards me. The afternoon light filters into the glass box of her living room, so airy and luminous that it feels like we’re floating in the trees above Bel Air. “Wikipedia had my name as Salma Walderrama Hayek. I’ve never heard that word before in my life. I don’t even know if it’s an actual name or someone just made up a word.”

“Did we take it out?” she calls to her assistant in the next room, pausing to sip from a perspiring mug of ginger tea. In a room heady with the scent of burning fig candles, Hayek Pinault, dressed in a black crochet cardigan and fuzzy platform sliders, appears supernatural. At her feet her bleach-white dog, Lobito (meaning ‘little wolf’), is eyeing the plate of emoji-perfect chocolate chip cookies on the table between us.

Also on the table is an assortment of remedies designed to ward off the illness Hayek Pinault has come down with over the last few days. There are tissues, herbal teas, and a white platter of tangerines that you feel healthier just for looking at; and beside them all, Salma Hayek Pinault, professionally ignoring the borderline fever that is coming and going.

She sighs, then returns to the Wikipedia page she had mentally bookmarked. “They also say that I speak like ten languages. I do speak four very badly, but they got the wrong ones. That one I’m tempted not to correct,” she says with a private smile.

Wikipedia’s confusion about who Salma Hayek Pinault is reflects some of the struggle she’s endured trying to explain herself during her career. This despite being a Hollywood mainstay for almost three decades, both starring in and producing landmark television and films. Now, at 56, with a role as the romantic lead in Steven Soderbergh’s final Magic Mike movie and another in Angelina Jolie’s forthcoming trauma drama Without Blood, she no longer cares about convincing anyone.

“Sometimes they build you up, sometimes they bring you down. What are you gonna do?”

Dress, £1,750, Bottega Veneta. Cuffs, £7,700 (each) and earrings, £1,500, Beladora (vintage). Shoes, £270, Larroudé.

Ashley Olah

Hayek Pinault woke up this morning not feeling well. The same not-Covid that has been tormenting the UK for months followed her to LA and to the Golden Globes, where, in a silver chandelier of a Gucci dress, she could tell she was coming down with something. But a few days later, in the dramatic glow of her Los Angeles home, her storytelling abilities remain unscathed, and she fires off anecdotes with the comic timing of a guest on a late-night sofa. She starts with an almost-rags-to-riches tale about her husband [François-Henri Pinault, the chairman and CEO of luxury goods group Kering] and how his underdog French football team Rennes – the club he once worked as ball boy at and now owns – just beat Paris Saint-Germain. Fairytale ending: “Oh, we were celebrating for two days!”

Then there is another comedy routine about the cartoonishly ripped male dancers who make up the cast of Magic Mike's Last Dance jumping in the pool of her London home at the wrap party. Punchline: “The women in the house told me, ‘We feel like we should pay to come to work today.’”

Hayek Pinault’s talent for humorous theatricality has long gone unrewarded, despite a career that has spanned 30 years and includes numerous awards. This problem goes back to when she arrived in America: she was already a star in her native Mexico, yet found the parts she was sent were all slightly different shades of the same thing. Her breakout role came in the 1996 film From Dusk Till Dawn, opposite George Clooney, Harvey Keitel and Quentin Tarantino. Hayek Pinault’s character, the vampiric Santanico Pandemonium, stalks through the lurid Titty Twister bar wearing a bikini and with a snake draped around her.

The truth is that Hayek Pinault has a deep phobia of snakes and had to enter a trance-like state to do that hypnotic performance. Surrounded by professional strippers, she had no idea what she was doing. “They just kind of threw me on the stage with the snake, put the music on and said, ‘Hey, dance!’” she recalls. Hayek Pinault asked director Robert Rodriguez if there was any choreography, but he didn’t want it to feel staged. Instead, she says, she was pointed in the direction of a strip club to conduct her own research. “I was feeling insecure [and] just wanted to get through it,” she says. “It was a really small part but to my surprise people really remember that moment.”

Pandemonium required Hayek Pinault to harness her inner sexuality, a complicated kind of power. But once the snake was out, it wasn’t easily banished. After From Dusk Till Dawn she was sent stripper roles again and again, and perhaps since that moment has been inextricable from that evocative image. She has appeared on ‘sexiest’ and ‘most beautiful’ lists countless times. Prince’s 2009 track “Valentina”, written about Hayek Pinault and named for her daughter, describes her as “curvier than a Fender Stratocaster guitar”. She has played exotic vixens with names such as Rita Escobar, Bella Flores, and the quite literally feline Kitty Softpaws.

“I was typecast for a long time,” she says. “My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn’t give me comedies. I couldn’t land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy [2010’s _Grown Ups_], but I was in my forties! They said, ‘You’re sexy, so you’re not allowed to have a sense of humour,’” she says with a grim cackle. On the floor a single bark from Lobito, goes off like a gunshot. “Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the ’90s.”

Does that make her want to, well, scream? “I was sad at the time, but now here I am doing every genre, in a time in my life where they told me I would have expired – that the last 20 years I would have been out of business. So I’m not sad, I’m not angry; I’m laughing,” she says, quite clearly not laughing. “I’m laughing, girl.”

Ashley Olah

After From Dusk Till Dawn, Hayek Pinault started landing a succession of Hollywood roles in films like Dogma, Wild Wild West and Traffic. But her critical breakthrough came in 2002 with her portrayal of Frida Kahlo in Frida. A misunderstood Mexican artist whose feminine and intimate works were often looked down on and whose history has since been flattened into Instagram iconography, Kahlo had fascinated Hayek Pinault since she was a teenager. As a producer on the film, Hayek Pinault played a crucial role in its development, contacting Kahlo’s family directly, securing rights to the paintings, and even bringing on the Oscar-spinning Harvey Weinstein on board to co-produce.

Fifteen years after Frida’s release, an essay Hayek Pinault wrote in the New York Times revealed how Weinstein had emotionally tormented and sexually harassed her during the making of the film. “He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie,” she wrote, detailing how Weinstein’s requests for massages and oral sex would curdle into blind rage upon Hayek Pinault’s repeated refusals. Despite Weinstein’s numerous attempts to stop the film making it to cinemas, Frida earned critical acclaim on release and Hayek Pinault was nominated for an Academy Award.

Still, the story around her was the same. “When I was nominated for an Oscar the types of roles that people offered me did not change at all,” she says. “I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no.”

Feeling truly seen is not something that most actresses have been able to count on in Hollywood, particularly after turning 40. One person who did see Hayek Pinault’s talent was Mike White, creator of The White Lotus, in which he also recognised the high camp potential of the perpetually overlooked Jennifer Coolidge.

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White wrote his excruciating 2017 social satire Beatriz at Dinner with Hayek Pinault in mind. In it she plays a massage therapist and healer who spends an increasingly twitchy dinner party being commended on her work ethic and immigration status, negotiating the tripwire line between help and guest at every turn. White and the film’s director, Miguel Arteta, made the decision that they didn’t want Hayek Pinault’s input, but not for the reasons that had been inferred to her in the past. Instead they thought the spell she cast on screen was so powerful it was totally invisible to her. “They said, ‘We think you’re even more interesting than you think,’” she says. “That was exciting because somebody had a plan for me.”

Beatriz at Dinner now almost seems like an early sketch for The White Lotus in how it shatters the smiling façade of white privilege, assessing who is forced to comply with its performance. Although Hayek Pinault unfortunately won’t be checking in for the next season of The White Lotus, she is soon going location scouting for the series with Mike White. “Much better,” she says.

The tea isn’t working. Hayek Pinault stands up and fans herself a little; from her face, she's not feeling good. At this point, a mere mortal might excuse themselves and go back to bed to convalesce. Hayek Pinault says, “I’m gonna ask you for a favour. I need to wake up my brain.” She shuffles out of the room, returning with a packet of cigarettes. “I’m going to smoke a cigarette and get a shot of ginger.” She lights up, then begins hauling open the sliding glass doors between us to access the screensaver-ready vista beyond. “What was your question?”

Ashley Olah

Magic Mike, the story of a male stripper that serves as a sort of Channing Tatum biopic, has made £230 million globally across two films. The third, Magic Mike’s Last Dance, is (in a slightly _Inception_-esque headfuck) about the phenomenally successful London live show based on the original film. Hayek Pinault plays Maxandra Mendoza, an aloof businesswoman in a magenta trouser suit who, after witnessing Mike’s (Tatum’s) gyrating skills up close, takes him with her to the UK to bring his weaponised hips to the stage.

I found myself at the high-octane sexual Disneyland that is Magic Mike Live two weeks before I got married in 2021. My friends and I left riding a strange, spaced-out high, unsure quite what we had witnessed. There is a semi-spiritual element to its sense of sexual abandon. You don’t really have to desire anyone in the show; it’s more of a collective joy about the life-affirming feeling of being really, really turned on. (The effect can be delirious: my cousin, not a screamer, followed one of the dancers into a corner shop and came out shouting, “It was really him!”)

Like the films, Magic Mike Live is not quite porn. Instead, it might be something more complicated. “I think it’s a bit of role play for a lot of women: ‘I get to be someone else today,’” says Hayek Pinault, back on her sofa in chat-show-guest form. “You can go as far as you want. You know that you’re not going to get their number.”

The film, like the show, puts female desire centre stage, but in making it Hayek Pinault learned much more about men than she was expecting. “There was so much testosterone I was afraid I was going to start growing a moustache,” she says with a guttural laugh. On set the male dancers would start pumping weights in between takes. Members of the crew started joining in too. But then something strange happened: Hayek Pinault realised the conversations weren’t bro broadcasts, but dispatches on the private pleasures of vanity. The 12 men, all on strict diets and abstaining from alcohol, talked about their bodies like they were school science projects they had been carefully constructing for months. “They were talking about waxing parts of the body that I really didn’t want to hear about, but it was very refreshing,” she says, taking a drag from a second cigarette. “Before it would have been seen badly if they spent too much time on their bodies or were vain.”

Ashley Olah

In a way, Magic Mike is groundbreaking not just for its portrayal (and encouragement) of female desire, but also for its deconstruction of clichéd alpha masculinity. “It’s an exciting time to be a woman, but also to be a man,” Hayek Pinault says, before pausing. “Confusion is always a great landscape for revolution and I think deep inside we put a lot of weight on men. The old thing that they have to be successful and responsible financially for the family – that’s a lot.”

The dancers taught her a lot. So too did working with Channing Tatum, director Steven Soderbergh and writer Reid Carolin: three very different men, turning to her to ask what women want. In the past Hayek Pinault was used to writers and directors trying to tell her what women think or feel. But here they were, all ears. “More than being a movie about an older woman falling in love with a younger guy, it’s about a middle-aged woman that has a lot of potential and is sick of being undermined her entire life,” Hayek Pinault says.

Being undermined herself for so long forced Hayek Pinault to let go. Being reduced to the male fantasy of her image allowed her to see the shallowness of that same world. Being limited to hypersexual roles set her free from seeing herself in them.

“I’m at a place in my life where I don’t think my sexuality is the only thing that’s appreciated anymore,” she says. “But if it was, I wouldn’t care, because I've built enough respect around me from the people that really matter that I feel seen beyond that.” Just ask the admins of her Wikipedia page: the misconceptions about Salma Hayek Pinault were never really about her.

Lobito is restless, the sky is folding up for the day and Hayek Pinault might actually have a fever now, so I leave her to recover. At the foot of her snaking driveway I wait for an Uber, playing back the recording to check if I imagined the whole thing. The wolf dog, the absurdly beautiful house, cigarette smoke pooling in the corners of the glass doors. I keep thinking about one thing she said when I asked about returning to films where people strip off after years of trying to get away from them.

“This is full circle,” she said, clapping her hands together slowly as though dusting them off. “Now, somebody strips for me.”

Dress (price on request), Vivienne Westwood from Paumé. Bustier, £150, Trashy Lingerie. Earrings, £1,500, Beladora (vintage).

Ashley Olah

PRODUCTION CREDITS
Photographs by Ashley Olah
Styling by Rebecca Grice
Tailoring by Suzy Yun
Hair by Jennifer Yepez
Makeup by Scott Barnes
Manicurist Kimmie Kyees
Set design by Ava Jones
Produced by Annee Elliot