“I cannot tell you how mortifying”: the 1999 movie that made Salma Hayek feel “naked and embarrassed”
Everyone knows that, in Hollywood, sex sells. Salma Hayek knew that, too, but after breaking through in America, she refused to let herself be typecast, defined, or stuffed into a box because of it.
Thanks to her smouldering chemistry opposite Antonio Banderas in Desperado, and her scintillating dance in the filmmaker’s From Dusk Till Dawn, Hayek was established as one of the most desirable sex symbols in Hollywood, which wasn’t a label she was at all comfortable with.
As you’d expect, she was inundated with offers to play bombshells, objects of desire, and one-note eye candy, but she wanted to prove herself as a versatile and talented performer instead, heading into rom-com territory with Fools Rush In, horror with The Faculty, and comedy with Dogma.
However, the chance to play the female lead in the most expensive movie in Hollywood history, which boasted the biggest star in the business, was an opportunity that few actors, especially those who hadn’t quite established themselves yet, would turn down. With the benefit of hindsight, though, Hayek would have been much better off without Wild Wild West on her resume.
For one thing, it was shit and won four Razzies, including ‘Worst Picture’. Will Smith knows it’s one of the worst mistakes he’ll ever make, and she felt the same way. “When I first looked at the role, it was not interesting,” she admitted. “But it was a very big film with good actors and my agent was saying, ‘This is very good, this is going to be a very big film.'”
In scale, it was. In terms of success, it absolutely was not. As Rita Escobar, Hayek wasn’t given much to do other than play a damsel in distress, serve as a potential romantic wedge between Smith and Kevin Kline’s characters, and parade around in barely-there costumes that blatantly objectified her. She wasn’t nude in the film, but according to her, she may as well have been.
“I did Wild Wild West, and while I was never naked in Wild Wild West, I felt a lot more naked and embarrassed wearing that costume,” the Academy Award nominee shared, comparing it to her acclaimed role in Frida. “I would have to push myself out of my trailer every day. I cannot tell you how mortifying that was than actually being completely naked in bed with another woman.”
The whole thing was a regrettable experience, to be fair. Hayek hated the costumes she was wearing and the thinly-written part she was given to play, Smith turned down The Matrix to make it and has rued the day ever since, and director Barry Sonnenfeld called the scene where the leading man passes himself off as a woman “prurient, unnecessary, silly,” and only in the movie because producer Jon Peters demanded it.
He was also the reason there was the third-act showdown came opposite a giant mechanical spider, leaving Wild Wild West as one of the most notorious misfires in modern Hollywood, and a picture you’d have to travel pretty far to find anyone willing to say a kind word about it.
