Her new
film, Beatriz at Dinner, already has Oscar buzz. But on top of the acting,
Salma Hayek is also saving animals, running charities – and beating the hell
out of a
Trump piñata. Johnny Davis meets Hollywood’s busiest firebrand
It was after
a neighbour shot her dog that Salma Hayek realised Donald Trump would become
president.
“I thought
it was a crazy thing, that it would never happen but then something really
tragic happened to me,” she explains. “I have a ranch in America and a
neighbour of mine killed my dog.” Hayek, who owns around 50 animals, including
20 chickens, five parrots, four alpacas, two fish, some cats and a hamster,
says that Mozart, the tragic German Shepherd in question, had never attacked
anyone. “And the authorities in dealing with the neighbour, and what he did…
How is that legal? [Police have said the neighbour shot her dog after he found
it fighting with his dogs in his garage.] Just to understand what was the
normality of things. I realised in this moment, ‘Oh my God: he’s going to
win.’”
Hayek, a
Mexican immigrant to America who identifies as half-Spanish and half- Lebanese,
lives in London and is married to a Frenchman – who happens to be
François-Henri Pinault, billionaire CEO of the company that owns Saint Laurent,
Stella McCartney, Gucci – is perhaps uniquely placed to have firm views on
Trump, Brexit and immigration, and we’ll get to them.
Hayek is
primarily here this morning to talk about her new movie, The Hitman’s
Bodyguard. We are at a press junket for the film. Elsewhere on the first floor
of this smart London hotel are Samuel L Jackson, Ryan Reynolds and Gary Oldman,
answering questions. Junkets can be dispiriting, and rapport can be in short
supply. That is, unless you’re Salma Hayek, whose personality could light up a
funeral. She arrives in a riot of black and red polka dots, tottering shoes and
glossy hair, 5ft 2in and somehow 50 years old, although agelessly beautiful.
She plonks herself into an armchair, hoists her legs up, and proceeds to tug
the small table between us towards her. “Do you mind? They’re bringing me food.
I like my food.”
Hasn’t she
had breakfast?
“I did but
I’m still hungry,” she grins.
A round of
avocado on toast is spirited into the room, accompanied by a mystery shake in a
plastic container. (A second round soon follows.) Famous since she was a soap
star in Mexico in her 20s and with 40-plus Hollywood films to her name, Hayek
has done literally thousands of interviews. What does she make of the publicity
circuit?
“I’m good!”
she says. “I just pretend I’m having a conversation with a new friend.”
Indeed,
Hayek proves impossible not to like. She may be the perfect chat-show guest:
various presenters have hooted along as she’s shown off pictures of her Donald
Trump piñata, discussed her experience as a late-developing teen immersing
herself in holy water and praying to Jesus for breasts, or confessing she
accused Monsieur Pinault of having an affair after discovering text messages
from “Elena”, only to discover Elena was a language-teaching app.
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In fact, we
have Pinault to thank for Hayek’s turn in The Hitman’s Bodyguard. The
comedy-action caper is basically a mismatched buddy movie for Jackson and
Reynolds, hitman and bodyguard respectively. Hayek is only in a few scenes, but
as Jackson’s imprisoned criminal wife she matches him profanity for profanity.
“I think
Salma steals the whole movie,” says director Patrick Hughes. “I challenge
anyone not to fall in love with her because (a) she’s a polymath and (b) she
kicks ass.”
“I have to
tell you: action is not my favouritest [sic] genre of films,” Hayek says. “But
I married a man who really likes them. So I became an expert. So I see them
all!”
The image of
fashion’s most powerful CEO spending his downtime like this is intriguing. What
is his favourite action movie?
“Oh, it’s
like Sophie’s choice for him, I think.”
What about
Die Hard, I suggest.
“Oh, he
loves Die Hard. But we love Bourne.” She claps her hands. “Sometimes he doesn’t
even like [a film], he says: ‘Oh my God, that was so bad!’ But he still has to
watch the whole thing.”
It’s a man
thing, I say.
“Yes! My
brother likes that one, my father likes that one… and because of that, when we
were doing [The Hitman’s Bodyguard] I was able to say it was going to work,
because it had a lot of the stuff that the good ones have.”
Similarly,
do actors always know when they’re making a turkey?
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“Oh yeah!”
Hayek says, crunching through her toast. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know. And
unfortunately I’ve never been wrong!”
Her CV is
mixed. The first Mexican actress to break into Hollywood since Dolores del Río
in the pre-sound 20s, she’s played a lesbian taco in the kids’ film Sausage
Party and so-so roles in films such as Spy Kids 3D and Wild, Wild West. But she
also earned an Oscar nomination for Frida, her 2002 portrait of Frida Kahlo,
and The Hollywood Reporter has just tipped her for 2018’s awards season for
Beatriz At Dinner, in which she plays an immigrant who clashes with a self-made
billionaire.
At first,
she says, she hated being famous. “This was terrifying because in Mexico when
you do a soap,” – at this point she leaps out of her chair and heads for the
door – “Don’t worry, I’m not escaping… Hello?” Her security guard appears with
a pack of American Spirit cigarettes. “My soap was seen by 60% of the country,
so it’s every day, in their house. Do you mind? Do you want one?” she says,
offering the smokes. “So you become very familiar, like you’re their cousin or
something. I’ve never been so famous since. I kind of hated it.”
If she hated
the attention so much, I wonder why she headed for Hollywood. But Hayek is
battling with the curtains while she attempts to heave open a sash window so
that she can smoke, unlit fag in her mouth. Not relishing the idea of Hayek
tumbling on to the streets below, it seems only polite to help. For a few
seconds she holds back the curtains, while I struggle to wrench the window.
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“Oh my God,
that was so easy,” she says. “I really did want to be an actress, not just ‘be
famous’. It’s a different thing. Because I was famous on a soap! That doesn’t
make you a great actress. So I went to America to start all over again.”
This was the
90s. She played extras and enrolled in the Stella Adler Academy Of Acting in
LA, alma mater to Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. “And this is how old I am,
she [Adler] was still alive! She was 90 and she was still teaching and flirting
with the young boys. She was a tough cookie but she was brilliant.”
Hayek could
barely speak the language - “My English sucked” – worse, there weren’t any
parts. Mexican women played maids or gangster’s wives. “And that’s if you got
lucky.”
Hayek
threatened legal action against one director.
“I was
screen-testing for the lead in a film and they said that it was not written
Latin, but they wouldn’t mind changing it. I learned the script but when they sent
me the pages [for the audition] there was none of the things I had learned, it
was another role. So my agent called them and they said, ‘Are you crazy? She’s
Mexican. We can change [the race of] the bimbo, but not the lead.’
She got her
agent to call back. Would they please just give her five minutes to audition
for the part she’d learned?
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“And they
said, ‘Absolutely under no circumstances.’ So I said, ‘OK, you tell them that
they either see me, or I’m going to sue them.’ And they said, ‘There’s no point
in her coming, even if she had been the best audition she would have never
gotten the part… but now we hate her. Does she want to come knowing that we
detest her?’” They kept her waiting for five hours. They wondered why would she
do this to herself.
“I’ve never
said this to anyone, the name of the director, but it was Ivan Reitman. And I
said, ‘Well, I thought that the director that could see Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Danny DeVito as twins [1988’s Twins], and Arnold Schwarzenegger giving
birth to a child [1994’s Junior] maybe could see a Mexican as a fashion
editor.’ I thought I owed it to the new generation of Mexicans. That if I got
this right, maybe something will shift.”
Years later,
she bumped into Reitman and he apologised. “We had such a lovely conversation,
he was so elegant,” Hayek says. “He said, ‘I was wrong.’”
All of this
pales next to the hill she climbed for Frida.
“I was
obsessed,” Hayek says. “I was endeavouring to do a film about an artist in a
time when all the films about artists had failed. Already [the studios] were
going, ‘Oh no.’ Then I’d say, ‘It’s a period piece – about Mexicans! And
they’re communists! It’s a love story between an overweight man and a woman
that limps and has a moustache!’”
One studio
did eventually take it on, Edward Norton (her partner at the time) rewrote the
script for free and Hayek called in favours from co-stars including Ashley
Judd, then one of Hollywood’s most bankable faces. It opened in two cinemas.
Its success, I suggest, must have been all the sweeter.
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“Yes,” she
says. “Because [the studio] dismissed it. I didn’t even have a poster!”
It may not
surprise you to learn that Hayek is a committed activist: her list of
charitable endeavours is too long to go into here, but it includes her own
foundation helping women and children in Mexico, and the feminist charity Chime
For Change, founded with Beyoncé. “It’s so massive I don’t even know what to
tell you. I don’t just do awareness, I actually do strategy. I’m on the board.
It takes a lot, a lot, a lot of time.”
Other
projects receiving the full force of the Hayek commitment include her range of
nutritional juices, and a beauty line which she created herself. She also has
her own production company, which helped turn the TV show Ugly Betty – based on
a Colombian telenovela – into a worldwide hit. I ask where this drive comes
from.
“It’s been
there since I’ve been a child. A sense of justice and responsibility for the
human race. How can we be better? Because a lot of people don’t think that way.
They think: ‘How can I pay less tax?’ And so when I see things that make me
think we are degrading and degenerating mentally it makes me want to do
something.”
She has been
hugely successful. She’s married to one of the world’s richest men. (Their
daughter, Valentina, attends school in London.) She could just put her feet up.
Of course, it’s a cheap question – we already know the answer.
“Why would
anybody want to sit around and do nothing?”
Hayek says
that she made it clear she would always remain financially independent from her
husband, whose net worth is around $17.3bn. Which may explain money-job films
like Sausage Party.
Mirror mirror: Hayek guest stars in Ugly Betty
with America Ferrera.
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Mirror mirror: Hayek guest stars in Ugly Betty
with America Ferrera. Photograph: Danny Feld/ABC
“At the time
I met him, I had already decided I didn’t want one of those [ie a husband],”
she says. “I had set myself up for a completely different life. I was ready to
live on my ranch that is a sanctuary for abused animals. I would come to LA and
work a little bit. I was not planning on spending. I had no interest in
jewellery or clothes or cars. I had everything I wanted. Maybe I had a guy here
or there. I also thought I couldn’t have children. Then he [Pinault] came
along, swept me off my feet, changed my entire universe and knocked me up.”
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Can she
remember what they first liked about one another?
“Yes. I
asked him, if he had not been doing what he was doing, what would have been his
dream? And he said an astronaut – and that was my dream! Then we started talking
about different theories of physics, which is my secret passion. And soccer!
I’m a huge soccer fan [she supports Arsenal]. Just random things that nobody
knows I like. It was just magical.”
As a global
citizen at a time when the world seems to be closing in on itself, is Hayek
optimistic for the future?
“Very
optimistic. I have to look for the positive about everything.”
Hayek
campaigned for Clinton. How’s it going to end for Trump?
“I can
promise you he’s not going to build the wall. You cannot build it without the
Mexicans that are illegally in the country. That is what makes the economy so
strong because they are paid less than half, with no benefit. It’s just not
going to happen!”
Hayek is
banging her fist on the table.
“His days
are numbered! Even if he becomes a dictator and rewrites the constitution and
now the presidents can stay 12 years! Still his days are numbered!”
Salma Hayek:
activist, actor, producer, juicer, businesswoman, friend to the animals and
all-round proper laugh. You wouldn’t mess.
The Hitman’s
Bodyguard is in cinemas on 17 August
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