The movie Salma Hayek was waiting her entire life for: “I was sad at the time”
She might have gained an extra name in recent years, but Salma Hayek is still the same badass actor she always was.
In recent years, she’s appeared in a number of various projects – from animated kids movies to superhero blockbusters to whatever the hell House of Gucci was, her portfolio is looking pretty diverse, but this wasn’t always the case.
After getting off the ground with a series of TV shows in her native Mexico, Hayek began to make a splash in America in the 1990s. This is when she established her working relationship with Robert Rodriguez, who helped turn her into one of the most desirable action heroines of the age. Unfortunately, this became something of an albatross. While she did make some ventures into the world of drama, particularly with Frida, she was mostly confined to these action or action-adjacent romps. It got to the point where it looked like she was going to be stuck in this rut forever.
In an interview with GQ, Hayek revealed that this early typecasting used to get her down. According to her, producers and casting directors refused to put her in anything that didn’t show off her physical beauty. Hayek didn’t want her entire career to be defined by this. She had other, very different plans.
“My entire life, I wanted to do comedy, and people wouldn’t give me comedies,” she said. “I couldn’t land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy, but I was in my forties! They said, ‘You’re sexy, so you’re not allowed to have a sense of humour’… 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.”
The comedy Hayek is referring to is Grown-Ups. Sandler plays a grown-up manchild (shocker) who reunites with four of his closest friends for a weekend of nostalgia and regression. I could tell you who played these friends, but this is a Sandler movie, so you can probably figure it out for yourself. Hayek plays Sandler’s character’s wife, a fashion designer who becomes caught up in her husband’s scheme.
In the years immediately following Grown-Ups, everyone else quickly cottoned on to Hayek’s comedic potential. Two years later, she appeared in Here Comes the Boom, a sports comedy starring devout Sandlerite Kevin James. A couple of years down the line, she starred opposite Jessica Alba and Pierce Brosnan in Some Kind of Beautiful, a romantic comedy.
She even reprised her role as Mrs Sandler in Grown-Ups 2. Unfortunately for her, most of these movies were absolutely terrible. Grown-Ups 2 even landed her a nomination for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ at the Razzies.
They might not have done her Rotten Tomatoes average any good, but these films certainly helped Hayek feel better about herself, and after years of playing the same characters over and over again, this was a breath of fresh air, even if that fresh air stank of faeces.
