The one movie Salma Hayek swore she’d never watch: “I remember it was awful”
In the late 1990s, Salma Hayek had very good reason to veto the idea of clapping eyes on a film she had actually starred in, no matter how popular her character’s fate became with audiences.
You see, actors can be an inherently insecure bunch, and to many, the idea of watching their own performance is a fate worse than death, fearing that all they’ll do is pick it apart over perceived faults or feel self-conscious about their onscreen presence. Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Reese Witherspoon, and Emma Stone are among this group who avoid their work altogether, and even the great Meryl Streep has admitted she’s never watched any of her own films more than once.
With that said, Hayek’s reason for avoiding Robert Rodriguez’s 1998 teen sci-fi horror The Faculty isn’t tied to the self-loathing nature of most creative artists, but to very regular fact that she’s simply a scaredy-cat when it comes to horror films, so the idea of subjecting herself to one, even if she was part of making it, was a non-starter.
“Oh, I hate horror films, and I don’t watch them,” Hayek sheepishly admitted to Role Recall in 2023, “I don’t understand them very well. It’s a genre that I just don’t get into”.
However, even with such trepidation in her heart, she’s not only starred in one but two horror movies of Rodriguez’s making, with 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn seeing her navigate an environment filled to the brim with blood, guts, vampires, and a mariachi band playing a dismembered corpse like a musical instrument. Maybe she felt like she owed him for he first introduced her to American audiences with the action flick Desperado, but I can only assume she’s never watched the Quentin Tarantino-written movie either. It must seem like a gap in her history, because she claims she doesn’t fully remember her iconic python-dancing scene, having entered a trance-like state to shoot it.
Amusingly, Hayek is so opposed to horror that she’s never even seen her gruesome death scene in The Faculty, despite fans raving about it to her for years. Clearly not even wanting to think about it, she claimed, “I don’t even remember it. Somebody kills me, I know. I remember it was awful”.
Perhaps the star really has blocked out any memory of the skin-crawling scene, in which the T-1000 himself, Robert Patrick, plays the veiny, white-eyed alien who has killed and taken a high school football coach’s form, intent on slipping his grotesquely elongated tongue into her ear to pulverise her brain. You know what, it probably would be pretty traumatic to see yourself die like that, and maybe Hayek has the right idea, regardless of her aversion to the whole genre.
