Salma Hayek Credits Adam Sandler for Helping Her Escape ‘Sexy’ Typecasting
“Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the Nineties,” she said
Adam Sandler and Salma Hayek Pinault speak during the Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony for Salma Hayek in 2021. EMMA MCINTYRE/GETTY IMAGES
Salma Hayek reflected on her career and the person who helped her foray into comedy: Adam Sandler. In an interview with GQ UK, the Mexican actress spoke about how she was finally able to pivot her career thanks to her role in Grown Ups, which Sandler co-produced.
“I was typecast for a long time,” she said. “My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn’t give me comedies. I couldn’t land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy, but I was in my forties!”
She added, “They said, ‘You’re sexy, so you’re not allowed to have a sense of humor… Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the Nineties.”
Hayek said that her lack of comedy roles made her “sad at the time,” but that today she’s able to do whatever genre pleases her. “Now here I am doing every genre, in a time in my life where they told me I would have expired — that the last 20 years I would have been out of business,” Hayek said. “So I’m not sad, I’m not angry; I’m laughing.”
Hayek explained that her starring role in Frida — and the Oscar nominee she received for it — would lead her to landing gigs outside of the “sex appeal” she had been known for with movies like Dusk Till Dawn. “When I was nominated for an Oscar, the types of roles that people offered me did not change at all,” she said. “I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no.”
Since Grown Ups, Hayek has been able to score roles in comedy films such as Like a Boss, Sausage Party, and Drunk Parents. She’s also set to star in Magic Mike’s Last Dance with Channing Tatum later this month.
Hayek previously opened up about how Harvey Weinstein — who she claims sexually harassed her multiple times — also told her that “the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal,” Hayek wrote in a New York Times essay.
“The range of his persuasion tactics went from sweet-talking me to that one time when, in an attack of fury, he said the terrifying words, ‘I will kill you, don’t think I can’t,’” Hayek wrote at the time. “In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.”
From Rolling Stone US.
