Salma Hayek almost sued a Harrison Ford movie she wasn’t even in: “Now we hate her”
Every actor faces at least a few obstacles when trying to make their way from anonymity to ubiquity, with Salma Hayek encountering enough roadblocks to leave her questioning why she’d even bothered.
After breaking out in her native Mexico as a telenovela star, the aspiring star quickly realised that being a small-screen favourite on home soil wasn’t worth a thing in the United States, especially when all of the roles she was being offered were about as stereotypical and demeaning as it gets.
Robert Rodriguez was her first guardian angel, casting Hayek in Desperado, From Dusk till Dawn, and The Faculty, three roles that helped put her on the Hollywood map. Still, casting agents and filmmakers continued to objectify her above all else, so she decided to make her own luck.
Once again, though, it wasn’t easy. She spent years trying to bring Frida Kahlo’s life story to the big screen, and when she finally did, it was worth the wait. The 2002 biopic, which she also produced, earned her an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ and opened up new doors that had previously been locked shut.
However, between those two points, there were still issues. Speaking to The Guardian, Hayek recalled the humiliating process of auditioning for an expensive adventure flick with Harrison Ford in the lead role, only to discover that when she arrived for her screen test, saying she’d been misled was an understatement.
“I was screen-testing for the lead in a film, and they said that it was not written Latin, but they wouldn’t mind changing it,” she explained. “I learned the script, but when they sent me the pages, there were none of the things I had learned. It was another role. So my agent called them, and they said, ‘Are you crazy? She’s Mexican. We can change the bimbo, but not the lead.'”
When she asked if she could audition anyway, she was told, “Absolutely under no circumstances,” which almost led to drastic action. “So I said, ‘OK, you can tell them that they either see me, or I’m going to sue them,'” Hayek added. “And they said, ‘There’s no point in her coming, even if she has the best audition, she would have never gotten the part, but now we hate her. Does she want to come, knowing that we detest her?”
What was the film? She kept it to herself for years before finally letting the cat out of the bag. “I’ve never said this to anyone, the name of the director, but it was Ivan Reitman,” which she later confirmed was 1998’s Six Days, Seven Nights, with Anne Heche playing the part she thought she was auditioning for.
Not only that, but she made an excellent point: “I thought that the director that could see Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as twins, and Arnold Schwarzenegger giving birth to a child, maybe could see a Mexican as a fashion editor.” Apparently not, as she was quite clearly told.
