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 Entertainment | June 2006 
Salma Hayek, a Mexican Wave of Success
 Siobhan Synnot - scotsman.com
| | Salma Hayek, a Mexican wave of success. |
Describe 5-2 Salma Hayek as small and she'll stop you in your tracks. "I'm short," she corrects, good-humouredly, "not small." Indeed, there's nothing small about Hayek's ambitions and drive. Aged 23, she packed two suitcases and headed to Hollywood, believing she would be a movie star within four months. Back home, she had been raised in comfort by her businessman father and opera-singer mother. Her progress into acting was almost as gilded - spotted in a stage version of Aladdin, she was given the lead role in a Mexican soap opera.
Teresa was a hugely popular Mexican soap, screened in 20 countries with tens of millions tuning in to watch Hayek's heroine suffer each week. In the US, however, opportunities for a Latina in films were few and far between, especially a Latina with virtually no working knowledge of English.
"I knew enough words to shop and to eat. I could say blue sweater, crème brûlée, and Caesar salad. Good words for vacations but not really for engaging with Americans," says the 39-year-old.
"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. I was so naive that I'd send the tape of my soap around, and I'd pick all the crying scenes. I thought that crying would really impress them. People would look at me like I was an alien."
However, she soon discovered a more fundamental obstacle to her career than the language, her artlessness and a lack of connections. Citing her thick accent, casting directors told her that her voice would remind audiences of their maids. Directors could not see her glamorous Mexican look in any role other than "a waitress, a whore or a housekeeper".
"I went to one audition for a role in a science-fiction film," she recalls. "The producer said: 'We can't use you.' When I asked why, he said: 'There are no Mexicans in outer space'."
Sixteen years on, Hollywood has learned to speak her language. Yet she struggled to find anything more substantial than walk-on roles in sitcoms, until Mexican-born director Robert Rodriguez cast her in the 1995 western Desperado as a local bookstore owner in a violent, desolate town of illiterates serially gunned down by Antonio Banderas.
Hayek recalls: "I read the first review, and it said 'Salma Hayek is a bombshell.' I had heard that when a movie does badly here, they say it bombs. So I cried because I thought they were saying, 'It's a bomb, and Salma Hayek is the worst part of the movie.' I called my friend and said: 'The critics are destroying me!' And she told me: 'No, they're saying you're very sexy'."
Even after being accorded bombshell status, Hayek's career flailed. She appeared in a series of mediocre films such as Fled, Fools Rush In and 54. The female lead in Wild Wild West did not help because the film was such a big, big dud. But another Rodriguez film, From Dusk Till Dawn, gave her another chance to set out her stall, with a small key role as a bikini-clad vampire who dances with an 11ft python, then ruins co-star Quentin Tarantino's day in a whirl of teeth and blood. Three years ago, her performance in Frida as the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo brought her credibility of a more highbrow nature. A Sylvia Plath of the art world, Kahlo's life story had attracted competing projects with Jennifer Lopez and Madonna attached - but Hayek persevered and won. She was given permission to film inside the studio of Kahlo's husband, Diego Rivera, and personally persuaded Mexican president Vicente Fox to allow filming at Teotihuacan, the scarred ancient ruins near Mexico City. Underlying the soft accent and feminine dress sense there is a resolute toughness to Hayek.
Not even Madonna could make a Frida biopic a reality, and the notoriously abrasive producer Harvey Weinstein admiringly called Hayek a "ball-breaker" after trying to negotiate a re-edit with her and her film team. Frida, the movie, might have been a paint-by-numbers rendering of a singular life, but Hayek still dominated the screen and won her first Academy Award nomination. Since then, she has also become a director, winning an Emmy in 2003 for The Maldonado Miracle, about a bleeding statue of Jesus that is not quite the miracle it purports to be. She is also writing a screenplay which she hopes to direct. "When I had only 15 pages, I showed it to Jamie Foxx, and he wants to do it. But let's see if I like it when I'm done."
A shorter directing engagement this year involved the artist known once again as Prince, who asked her to direct his video, Te Amo Corazón. Prince described Hayek as "the most thoughtful, attentive director I have ever worked with".
Coming later this year is Bandidas, in which she and Penelope Cruz star as a pair of feisty Mexican bank robbers, who are more Robin Hood than Thelma and Louise. Despite the fact that the two actresses often seem to compete for the role of Hollywood's leading Latin lady, Hayek positively sought out the Spanish actress from early on in her career.
"When I was at the Cannes Film Festival with Desperado, a Spanish journalist asked me if there was anyone I'd like to work with and I said that I'd love to work with Penelope Cruz. I would say this in every interview I'd give, so she'd see it."
"Finally one time, when she came to Los Angeles, she got my phone number and called me. We had a coffee together and became instantly good friends. It happened eight or nine years ago and a beautiful friendship has developed through the years. But even before the friendship we wanted to work together."
Yet while she and other Spanish and Latino actors such as Cruz, Lopez and Banderas have arguably become part of the Hollywood A-list, they still fight against received ideas of ethnic roles. This may be one reason why it took eight years for Hayek to agree to play the lead in her new film, Ask the Dust. Based on a 1939 novel by John Fante, it was written and directed by Chinatown's Robert Towne. Hayek plays opposite Colin Farrell as a Mexican maid in love with a sexually inexperienced Italian immigrant. Both dream of success or acceptance in a LA where racism created terrible collisions long before Crash.
"She turned the script down when she first got to LA," says Towne. "She'd come here, trying to get work in American movies, and the only role she was being offered was as a Mexican waitress. So even though this was a far bigger, richer role than what she was seeing, Salma was reluctant to say yes."
Hayek disputes this account mildly: "I didn't understand the part. I didn't understand the relationship. I was too young. Eight years after, I read it again, and I'm like, 'What was I thinking?' It's one of the best written parts I've ever seen."
YET DESPITE THIS diplomacy, she must fume privately over the double standard in movie casting that even Ask the Dust innocently endorses. An Irish actor playing an Italian? No problem. Colin Farrell as a shy virgin? Ditto. Yet while studios accept these twin challenges to credulity, Hayek still struggles to be cast against her racial type, and studios apparently still carp about her tequila-accented English.
"I'd tell the executives: 'Arnold Schwarzenegger has an accent.' They'd become so nervous because they had no answer for that. Arnold played mostly robots at the beginning of his career. Then once the money started rolling in, all these directors and producers go deaf. They just hear one sound - ka-ching!"
Of course, says Hayek tactfully, for an actress from any background "it's tough to find good women's roles. I got lucky with Ask the Dust. I think there'll be a lot of American girls jealous of my part."
"Yes, the film is about prejudice, and I've experienced prejudice - but I never let it bother me. I don't need to reaffirm my status as a Mexican. What interested me about the role wasn't where the character was from, or her experience as an immigrant. There are other things about her that interest me more."
There were also other characters on set to cause her some anxiety too. Just as her waitress in Ask the Dust is initially hostile to Farrell's writer, Hayek was initially wary of the Irish actor, who arrived on set in a blaze of tabloid headlines about his party hellraising.
"I didn't know if he was going to know his lines, or be on time, or if he could play the part. And maybe we weren't very comfortable with each other at the beginning - my fault. But he's the only actor I've ever worked with who knew the script by heart in rehearsal - his lines and mine," she admits.
"We had a big nude scene and when we came out of the trailers, I had all these coats on. Then out comes Colin, running naked, dancing like in a ballet. Then finally, for the first time that day, I laughed."
"Colin actually lost weight for the part, but I put on about 10 pounds. I just felt that a woman in the 1930s and a waitress would have some meat on her bones. I was coming from the film After the Sunset, where I was a lot slimmer, so I decided to just let go and eat hamburgers."
"Can you imagine there is a movie out there where the woman was allowed to gain weight and the man lost weight?" she laughs. "Now, that's progress." |
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