The performance that got Salma Hayek attacked in a restaurant: “You ungrateful, horrible girl”
Suspension of disbelief is key for any actor hoping to make a name for themselves in film and television, even if Salma Hayek got a shock when she discovered audiences had become so invested in one of her characters that the lines between fact and fiction had become dangerously blurred.
Most people have no issues separating the artist from the art, but Hayek’s work hit so close to home that she was attacked in public. That’s not a situation anybody wants to be in when things could go perilously wrong, but she somehow managed to take it all in her stride.
In a sense, it could be seen as a compliment when Hayek was so convincing that she was unable to venture outside without folks in the street being able to delineate the part she played on TV from the actor she was whenever the cameras weren’t rolling. Still, nobody wants to get whacked in the back of the head in the middle of dinner, especially when she was out with her mother at the time.
After making her screen debut in 1988’s telenovela Un Nuevo Amanecer, the future Academy Award nominee wasted little time becoming a household name in her native Mexico. The very next year, she inhabited the title role in Teresa, playing a young woman born in poverty-stricken circumstances who ingratiates herself with affluent classmates, posing as a rich person to live the life she envisioned.
The role of Teresa Chavero Martínez won Hayek the first major award of her career when she was named ‘Best Revelation’ at the TVyNovelas Awards, with the trophy awarded to the female performer who gave the best performance in their first major telenovela. It set her on the road to success but it didn’t come without its pitfalls.
When taking her old dear out for a bite to eat, Hayek recalls feeling a designer handbag slam into the back of her head. “Suddenly, pow!” she exclaimed to The Telegraph. “This woman is hitting me with her purse and screaming, ‘You ungrateful, horrible girl! How dare you defy your mother like that!”
Naturally, Diana Jiménez Medina was perplexed as to why somebody she’d never seen before in her life had opted to bludgeon her daughter over the dome for an incident she didn’t recall, until the pieces fell into place and she realised the aggression was based entirely on what unfolded in living rooms around the country the night before.
“And this was a very elegant woman,” Hayek added. “But I was misbehaving in her house every evening at nine o’clock. The whole country saw me as their cousin.” They might have seen her as a family member, having spent so much time with her on their screens, but assaulting her in a restaurant was still several steps too far.
