The role Salma Hayek refused to play for almost a decade: “I thought she was an awful human being”
It seems strange to imagine that actor Salma Hayek has been ever-present on cinema and TV screens for five different decades now, but despite looking about 30 years younger, she has in fact reached her late 50s and shows no signs of slowing down.
Many will remember her first thanks to her turn as Antonio Banderas’ love interest in 1995’s Desperado and then a year later in her scene (and possibly whole film) stealing performance as vampire-stripper Santanico Pandemonium in Quentin Tarantino’s fairly unhinged From Dusk Til Dawn.
But she has since gone on to amass quite a back catalogue of quality productions, from an award-winning performance as legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in 2022’s Frida to her brilliant take on self-parody in ‘Joan is Awful’, a season six episode of Charlie Brooker’s Netflix smash Black Mirror.
There was, however, one role that caused her some consternation, so much so that she refused to even think about picking it up for almost a decade. That film was Ask the Dust, alongside Colin Farrell, written and directed by Chinatown legend Robert Towne.
Why Hayek refused Robert Towne’s script
Hayek’s character was to be cafe waitress Camilla, a struggling Mexican woman with two children trying her best to survive America’s Great Depression era of the early 1930s. She meets and falls in love with a Los Angeles-based writer named Arturo, played by Farrell, but later succumbs to tuberculosis.
Although Robert Towne approached her with a view to playing Camilla in the late 1990s, Hayek had serious reservations about saying yes. Upon the film’s release, she explained her trepidation, “He gave me this script eight years ago, and I did not understand the character. And I thought she was an awful human being, and racist… I just did not have the vision to see the subtleties of the character. And then, eight years later, I read that script and I thought, ‘Oh my God, what a fantastic opportunity. What a great character’.”
Ask the Dust certainly had some stellar backing: Tom Cruise produced it, and both Johnny Depp and Val Kilmer were originally to take on Farrell’s role but later dropped out. Based on a best-selling 1939 book, Towne picked up the rights to the story after Mel Brooks let them lapse and wrote the script in the early ’90s, initially finding it difficult to get studio backing to get the film made.
He then had to wait for nearly a decade after approaching Hayek to play the female lead. But it was certainly worth the delay once she finally accepted, as she noted, “I thought of this woman who thought [she] did everything wrong in her life, and she never accomplished anything, and she dies thinking that. And yet she inspired this fabulous book. So I would keep thinking of her. And I wish I could go back and tell her, but I can’t, you know?
From refusing to play the part to ending up relating to the journey of the character and owning the backstory, it’s certainly been a thoughtful process: “There’s a lot about the character. It doesn’t always happen, but there are some characters you really create a relationship with, almost as if they were your friend. And you never get into their heads again or think like them. They’re gone.”
The movie eventually opened to mixed reviews, mostly from critics who felt that Towne hadn’t managed to quite capture the emotion and desperation of the original text. Hayek’s performance however was widely praised and she revealed some of her thought process in how she approached the role.
“I thought of all the women that inspire great artists. Even if it was just someone’s first girlfriend, and later on in life, you still remember that first kiss, [and] that person makes you who you are as a man later, and they will never know it. And I thought of Camilla.”
Hayek has gone on to be an actor-director of some repute, gathering Emmy award nominations for directing and being named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.
She’ll next be seen alongside Chris Evans, Anya Taylor-Joy and Charli XCX in the adventure comedy blockbuster Sacrifice.
