Salma Hayek Details Desperado’s Traumatic Love Scene
In a recent interview, actress Salma Hayek opened up about her difficulty shooting a love scene in Desperado, one of her first major roles.
In a recent podcast interview, actress Salma Hayek opened up about her struggles while filming the love scene in the 1995 film Outlaw. The film, directed by Robert Rodríguez, was the second installment in her “Mexico Trilogy”. , which also includes the films El Mariachi and Once upon a time in Mexico, colloquially known as Desperado 2.
Outlaw tells the story of a Mexican vigilante called El Mariachi, played by Antonio Banderas, who seeks revenge on a drug dealer who murdered his lover. Although it has a different cast, the film follows Rodriguez’s 1992 film El Mariachi. Hayek plays Carolina, El Mariachi’s new love interest. Together they escape capture, bullets and death, not without pain and loss. The film was a breakout role for Hayek, being his first major Hollywood film.
Outlaw was also a very graphic film, which obviously included a lot of violence. However, it’s the movie’s love scene that worries Hayek. In a recent interview on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, Hayek opened up about his traumatic experience filming the scene. She reveals that the love scene wasn’t originally in the script, but was “required by the studio when they saw the chemistry” between Hayek and Banderas. She points out that while Banderas and Rodriguez were wonderful about the situation, she still found it unsettling.
“Robert Rodríguez’s Wife [the producer, Elizabeth Avellán], at that time, became my best friend. Robert Rodriguez, thank God he can do everything on a film set too… he can do sound, he can operate the camera and he was like my brother. So they closed the set and there was Robert, Elizabeth, Antonio and myself”.
Hayek admits it was fine, but since she had never done anything like this before, so when she started filming she “started sobbing”, repeating “I don’t know if I can do this” and “I’m afraid I will.” She cited Antonio’s free spirit as part of what scared her.
“He was an absolute gentleman and super nice and we’re still really good friends. But he was very free. So she scared me that for him… it was like nothing. And that scared me because she had never been in front of someone like that in that situation. And I started crying and he was like, “God, you make me feel bad.” He was so embarrassed that ‘He was crying.”
Hayek went on to say that “they were great but they weren’t giving up. Banderas, Rodríguez and Avellán tried to trick her into taking it off, but as soon as she did, she started crying again.
Hayek, however, clarifies that Banderas and Rodríguez were “incredible” and “beautiful” and that neither of them ever pushed her. Hayek also revealed that the scene was made up of such quick cuts because of her difficulty filming and because she couldn’t stay in the scene. Hayek admits that even now she can’t enjoy this scene while watching it.
She also mentions the double standards placed on women, admitting that part of the reason she couldn’t get into character to get over it was because she was thinking about her father and brother. When the movie came out, she told them they couldn’t watch the scene and she got them out of the theater while it lasted. She said they were incredibly supportive of her, but she and Shepard commented on the unfair pressure put on women not only to respect themselves, but also to protect the egos and reputations of the men in her life.
While no stranger to Hollywood, more and more celebrities are opening up about her traumatic experiences of being vulnerable, and at worst harassed or assaulted, on set. It’s important to hear these stories so that Hollywood can change and adapt. By employing privacy coordinators and other on-set security measures, Hollywood has taken steps to ensure that experiences like Hayek on the set of Outlaws aren’t repeated, so hopefully the industry will continue to grow and adapt.
