SALMA HAYEK
AT SOME POINT IN YOUR LIFE YOU SETTLE FOR DOING THE RIGHT THING AND THE BEST YOU CAN, INSTEAD OF THINKING ABOUT WHAT YOU DIDN’T GET
Hi! How’s your day been going?” says Salma Hayek, marching through the door of a suite in Berlin’s Regent Hotel. “How many films have you seen?” She is exactly as Javier Bardem, her co-star in Sally Potter’s new movie The Roads Not Taken, describes: “Hurricane Hayek.” Dressed in a black jacket, trousers and boots, with a white polo-neck and gold jewellery, she stands with her assistant, rubbing moisturiser in her hands and touching up her lipstick. But when she sits, the ‘Hurricane’ subsides and she’s all ours.
Hayek’s clearly delighted to be back at the Berlin Film Festival – a place she has great affection for. Back in 1995, she came here with Midaq Alley, the very same year she moved away from her status as a soap star in Mexico to wow Hollywood in Desperado and Four Rooms. “I just love this festival,” she beams. “We need to keep film-going alive.” At 53, Hayek adores cinema as much now as she did when she saw Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory as a child growing up in Coatzacoalcos, inspiring her to become an actress.
When we meet, it’s just three days since the jury found disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein guilty of rape and sexual assault. Like so many other women, Hayek had felt the brunt of his abusive behaviour. “For years, he was my monster,” she wrote in an essay for The New York Times, detailing the horrendous behaviour she endured from him – whether it was propositioning her with various sex acts or berating her throughout the process of making 2002’s Frida, the biopic of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo that eventually saw Hayek deservedly nominated for an Oscar.
For all this, there’s a feeling today of new beginnings. In Potter’s film, she features with Bardem, husband in real life to Penélope Cruz, who has been her best friend for over two decades and was her co-star in 2006 western . With Bardem playing Leo, a dementia-stricken writer, Hayek features as his “childhood sweetheart” Dolores, a woman nursing her own deep tragedy. Like her recent projects, and , it’s a timely reminder of just what a powerful screen presence she is.
