“Madonna would do it”: How Quentin Tarantino’s threats helped Salma Hayek conquer her fears
It’s hardly a secret that Quentin Tarantino has a thing for feet, but having somebody suck on her toes wasn’t the major fear Salma Hayek needed to conquer when she worked with the filmmaker, although it can’t have been the most pleasant experience regardless.
Only Tarantino would script a scene where a character he plays is left with no option but to drink tequila directly from the toes of a beautiful woman, a sequence that obviously only exists in From Dusk till Dawn for one reason and one reason only.
It’s strange that Hayek has never appeared in a Tarantino-directed movie, though, especially when Robert Rodriguez is the tie that binds them. Hayek scored her Hollywood breakthrough in the director’s Desperado – with the Pulp Fiction creator among the cast – before playing ‘TV Dancing Girl’ in anthology Four Rooms, of which the Grindhouse duo both directed a segment.
They shared the screen in a landmark moment for fetishists everywhere in the vampiric action thriller, before Hayek reunited with Rodriguez over and over again on The Faculty, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. However, she almost backed out of From Dusk till Dawn altogether, until Tarantino helped sway her decision.
The Oscar-nominated star has a lifelong and deep-seated phobia of snakes, which wasn’t ideal considering Santanico Pandemonium makes her entrance with one draped across her shoulders. When she told the screenwriter she wasn’t up to the task, an ultimatum was issued that changed her mind.
“Quentin told me, ‘Oh by the way you’re dancing with the snake’. I said, ‘I can’t do it, I can’t do it. It’s my greatest fear,'” Hayek told Yahoo. “And he said, ‘Well Madonna would do it. Yeah, I already talked to her and she’s willing to dance with the snake.’” Whether there was even a shred of truth to his threat, it had the desired effect either way.
“It was good because I had to overcome my greatest fear,” she admitted after plucking up the courage to place the reptilian co-star upon her terrified frame. “I had to go on trance to do the dance, and there was no choreography. It was improvised. Because you can’t choreograph a snake, we don’t know what she’s going to do!”
If there’s one thing worse than watching Tarantino indulge his love for feet in such blatant fashion, then watching him do it with Madonna on the other end might just be up there. For Hayek, even though she managed to film the scene without losing her shit, her phobia of snakes remains as prevalent as ever. She can work with them under certain circumstances – and the odd threat – but she’ll still run a mile if she catches sight of one in the wild.
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