Salma Runs the Show

It’s a damp winter morning in Hampstead Heath, a tony London enclave that’s home to some of the city’s most covetable real estate, and I’m perched in Salma Hayek Pinault’s well-appointed parlor gazing at the impeccably manicured gardens that surround her baronial estate. A pad so impressive that it prompted my wide-eyed Uber driver to ask, “How many families live in there?” While Hayek Pinault, one of Hollywood’s most beloved and bankable stars, is wrapping up her daily meditation session, Nikki, her genial house manager flits about, dutifully tending to the vibes.

She’s lit Trudon candles, poured freshly brewed ginger tea, and laid out a Pinterest-worthy spread of delectable small bites; watermelon slices, plump raspberries, mixed nuts, an assortment of cookies and chocolates that beg me to abandon all healthy-eating New Year’s resolutions. “We do like to make it groovy in here,” Nikki says, proudly surveying her handiwork. “You go to other places and it’s boring. We like to make it colorful and happy.” I scope out this groovy, happy place, noting the plush deep-turquoise couches, Gucci accent pillows and matching Chiavari chairs from the golden Alessandro Michele era, the ceiling high bar stocked with top-shelf libations, a crackling fireplace made for cozy, English whiskey-soaked evenings.

When Hayek Pinault alights, she’s makeup free and dressed casually in tan dungarees, matching boots, and a chunky ribbed turtleneck. Though she’s nursing a serious cold, and sporting oversized black-framed readers, her unequivocal beauty cannot be hidden or denied. Thin gray streaks may weave through her lush hair, but if there’s a wrinkle on her 58-year-old face, I can’t find it. This gal, it quickly becomes clear, is no mere mortal. She is decidedly not like us. She, to quote an instantly iconic line from her stellar 2023 Black Mirror episode, is “Salma Fucking Hayek.”

And anyone who’s ever watched her on a late-night talk show knows that she’s as hilarious as she is stunning, so naturally Hayek Pinault makes a joke of not wanting to sit near me for fear that I’ll catch her bug. When I assure her that a cold from a screen legend would be quite the flex, she laughs. “Then they’re going to think that we made out,” she deadpans, before flashing me a grin. “The headlines are so depressing. Let’s give them something to talk about!”

Hayek Pinault has been doing just that since her breakout role as the sexy bookstore owner, Carolina, in the 1995 cult classic Desperado. And over the course of her incredible nearly four-decade career, the Mexican-born telenovela-star-turned-global-icon has made history, blazed trails, and become one of the industry’s most successful actors of all time, with a reported cumulative box-office revenue of $3.9 billion—yes, billion.

The Oscar-nominated actress has appeared in nearly 90 projects, and starred alongside a slew of A-listers, from Antonio Banderas to Lady Gaga. She’s danced with pythons (From Dusk Till Dawn), been mauled by a capuchin monkey (Frida), and vigorously humped by Channing Tatum (Magic Mike’s Last Dance). While many of her peers have been pigeonholed, Hayek Pinault has defied typecasting and proven her remarkable range, shining as brightly on television sitcoms (Ugly Betty, 30 Rock) as she does in action comedies (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard), quirky indies (Beatriz At Dinner), big-budget superhero spectacles (Eternals), prestige dramas (the Angelina Jolie-directed Without Blood), and animated adventures. Yes, that’s also her voicing the feisty feline, Kitty Softpaws, in the Puss In Boots franchise.

Her production house, Ventanarosa, founded 25 years ago, has been nominated for 259 awards and won 96, including all of the biggies, Academy Awards, Emmys, Golden Globes, BAFTAs. Currently run by Hayek Pinault and her production partner Jose Tamez, with head of production and development Siobhan Flynn, the company’s mission, so says the comprehensive press kit Hayek Pinault’s team gives me, is “highlighting the Latino experience, reinforcing the female point of view, and discovering new global talent.”

“There’s so much that’s not known about me,” Hayek Pinault says, before delving into a detailed account of her important contributions to the industry, the many projects she’s starred in, championed, and as a winning producer, ushered to the screen.

She points out that she was the first Mexican actress ever to be nominated for a Best Actress in a Leading Role Academy Award for her starring turn in 2002’s Frida, the only vehicle she’s ever produced for herself. “My publicist actually went and told the press [about this historical achievement],” she says. “Nobody wrote about it.” While Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu have swept up at the Academy Awards in recent years, no Latina has ever taken home a best actress Oscar and only two have won in the best supporting category; Rita Moreno for her 1961 turn as Anita in West Side Story and Ariana DeBose for the same role—60 years later. Across the top 100 grossing movies from 2007 to 2018 only three percent featured Latino leads or co-leads and less than five percent of all speaking characters were Latino, according to a 2019 USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study.

Hayek Pinault’s pioneering work, coupled with her unwavering commitment to carving out opportunities for Latino thespians, who prior to her arrival in the ’90s had largely languished in stereotypical roles—long-suffering maids, exotic paramours, lawbreakers, background dancers—has gone a long way to diversifying Hollywood, a calling she’s wholeheartedly embraced. “I won’t complain about anything that I haven’t tried to change,” Hayek Pinault says. “Somebody has to do it. And nobody has as much experience inside of so many places, for this amount of time, so I have a sense of duty to [fight for] change.”

In her 2024 HBO special, comedian Nikki Glaser riffed about the challenges of aging as a female celebrity. “Hollywood’s not kind to older women,” Glaser declared, “if you’re sagging, they’re gagging.” Historically this may have been true, and yet that appears to finally be changing. Women like Hayek Pinault, Michelle Yeoh, Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, Viola Davis, Pamela Anderson, Sheryl Lee Ralph, and Angela Bassett, all in their late 50s and 60s, are not only in the prime of their careers, but they’re enjoying unprecedented levels of visibility and success.

Instead of being completely put out to pasture or marginalized until they’re eligible to play an octogenarian reminiscing about an epic love affair, these actresses are reinventing themselves, taking career risks, delving deeper into their craft, and exploring untapped levels of creativity. Take Kidman, who at 57 is causing five-alarm fires in erotic thrillers. Or Ralph, who was 66 when she took home Emmy gold for her role on Abbott Elementary. Two years ago, at age 60, Yeoh won her first Academy Award and became the first Asian woman to waltz away with the grand statue for lead actress. Jamie Lee Curtis, then 64, scooped up her first Oscar for the same film, Everything Everywhere All at Once, a title which perfectly encapsulates how these women of a “certain age” are racking up accolades, rocking red carpets (sometimes sans makeup, like Anderson), and remaining at the forefront of the pop culture conversation.

Hayek Pinault is loving the shift in mindset around middle-age women in Hollywood. “There was a time when I was the sexy girl, but thank God age came and gave me the ability to expand to other territories,” she says, pausing and then proceeding with a smile. “Although I’m still sexy and I embrace it.” Her more than 29 million Instagram followers who can’t seem to get enough of her bikini pics would no doubt agree. “Another calling that I have is to remind everyone that women are not disposable after a certain age in any department. We should battle that with all we’ve got.”

During the several hours we’re together, Hayek Pinault rarely sits down. One minute she’s pacing about the room like a seasoned professor delivering a lecture to a rapt audience; the next, she’s kicking her leg in the air and dropping into yoga’s child’s pose when discussing her noteworthy mobility. “I’m very flexible,” she says proudly. “And I still do all of my own stunts.”

In another moment, she pulls out a marketing deck, points to the box office tallies of today’s leading ladies and zeroes in on the piles of gold coins she’s brought to Tinseltown’s coffers. “Look at this chart—you’re going to be blown away,” she says. “Me: $3,000,000,925.” She’s not bragging. She’s setting the record straight.

It would be easy for Hayek Pinault to rest on her laurels, to lean into a champagne-and-beluga-caviar life. Not only has she done well for herself, but for 16 years the actress has been married to one of the world’s wealthiest men, billionaire François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering, the French luxury goods company that owns Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Saint Laurent. It quickly becomes clear, however, that an idle existence is not for her.

The unrelenting star is driven by something she calls “anger that comes with pleasure.” By which she means, “I see something from the beginning and I’m certain about it. It’s a vision of something and nobody else is seeing it. And no matter how many times you explain it to them, show it to them, prove it to them, they decide not to see it. So, it’s an anger that comes with a pleasure to prove them wrong,” she explains.

All this business talk has made Hayek Pinault peckish. “I want quesadillas,” she declares. “Do you want quesadillas?” I do, of course. As Nikki tackles snacks, the actress sits for a brief spell and continues to passionately sound off about gender inequity in her industry. When a film is successful, “the credit goes to the man. The girl is just the girl.” Female co-stars only get credit when the movie fails, she argues. “I do have an audience and they go see me. But I’ve never gotten credit for the audience I bring into the cinema.”

Speaking her piece has never been a problem for Hayek Pinault, even in the earliest days of her career. While filming the ’90s intercultural romantic comedy Fools Rush In, starring the late Matthew Perry, she had 10 pages of notes on how she would beef up the script (“it wasn’t funny or emotional”) and flesh out her character—predictably that didn’t sit well with the director or studio execs. It took “a lot of balls,” she says, of her decision to be forthright with her thoughts about the movie’s shortcomings. Reactions to her perceived effrontery ranged from “who do you think you are” to “how dare you” she recalls.

Trumping egos, her rebuttal was firmly rooted in her lived experience. “The studio, the producers, the director and Matthew are all white men,” she says. “This character is a Mexican woman. Right now, I’m the only one that has the insight into what it’s like to be a Mexican woman. I’m sorry, you guys have no clue.”

It took steel cojones to get Ugly Betty, the U.S. version of a popular Colombian telenovela, on the air. This time Hayek Pinault was up against skeptical studio executives who were convinced that the fish-out-of-water series about a plain Jane Mexican-American woman eager to make it in the superficial fashion world lacked crossover appeal, and they were concerned that the Latino viewing audience wasn’t sizeable enough to make the show a success.

“Nobody wanted it. Nobody thinks it’s going to work,” she recalls. So she collected data about the buying power of the Latino market from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce to bolster her pitch and personally pre-sold Betty to advertisers. She was vindicated when more than 16 million viewers tuned in for the premiere episode in 2006. Decades before DEI became a maligned acronym, the groundbreaking series also featured a Black magazine editor-in-chief, her openly gay assistant, one of network television’s first openly gay kids in prime time, and a trans character who undergoes gender reassignment surgery. “I don’t blame them for not wanting to do it,” she says. “I was asking for the moon.”

Hayek Pinault takes pride in recounting her war stories, of which there are many. As she bites into the warm quesadilla that’s just arrived, she shares that it took her eight years to get Frida off the ground. Again, risk-averse suits didn’t think it could resonate with a wider audience. A period piece about a communist Mexican painter with a pronounced limp, pet monkey, and a thick unibrow is, to be fair, a tough sell, she acknowledges. Studio head Harvey Weinstein’s relentless sexual advances, detailed in a harrowing New York Times essay Hayek Pinault penned at the height of the #MeToo movement, only made matters worse. “It was a saga,” she says, sighing deeply. That story “could be three books.” The art house biopic went on to earn six Oscar nominations, critical acclaim, and nearly $60 million at the box office.

Does she still have to fight to get projects made? Even after such a track record of success? “Like a mad dog,” she says.

Nevertheless, she persists. “I’m one stubborn son of a bitch. I know what’s going to work. So, I go, and I go, until I find someone that finally sees it too.”

No one curses quite like Hayek Pinault. Naughty words mellifl uously tumble out of her mouth like delightful little oral grenades. “I have the best teacher: Samuel L. Jackson,” she says. “He’s [played] my husband—twice.” Her Hitman’s character, Sonia Kincaid, an over-the-top, expletive-spewing con artist, was hard to shake once filming wrapped, she says. “After those movies my vocabulary changed. I [couldn’t] get rid of Sonia. My husband was like, ‘How long is she going to stay?’ I said, ‘I don’t fucking know. Who the fuck cares. What’s your fucking hurry?’”

Inspired by her f-bomb fusillade, I ask her to teach me how to swear in Spanish, something to use if I ever, say, fi nd myself in a Tijuana prison. She’s game. Cállate, pendejo (shut up, asshole) should do the trick, she advises. Noted.

Hayek Pinault’s joie de vivre is infectious and time in her company is anything but dull. She credits her vitality to meditation; she’s been known to zen out for as long as two to three hours, “communicating with my own body and listening to my body,” she shares.

Going within allows Hayek Pinault to gain clarity, as well as appreciate the vessel that has carried her this far. She adds, “Because what do we do with our bodies? We don’t listen. Our only connection to our body is to complain. Why are you tired? Why don’t you go to sleep? Why are you sleepy? Why are you hungry? Why are you fat? Why are you horny? Why are you not horny? Why are you hurting? Bitch, do you notice what you’re doing to me?”

True pleasure can only come from being present in one’s life, body, and journey, Hayek Pinault believes. To live otherwise is setting yourself up for disappointment. Take sex, for example. “A lot of women are making love already with a transaction in their head. I hope he loves me more after this. Is he really into me? Has he noticed my cellulite? It’s like, Don’t think, girl! Be in the moment! Explore another human being. Learn yourself through another human being exploring you. Get out of the way!” she implores. “Get out of the way of love!”

If you’re looking for sound life advice, move over Mel Robbins, it turns out Hayek Pinault is your girl. What’s the key to maintaining a successful personal or professional relationship? Knowing how to quarrel, she offers. “I never enter a discussion to prove that I’m right. I go into conflict to solve,” she says. “If you solve, time will [reveal] if you were right or wrong, but don’t waste energy on anything that’s not conducive, that doesn’t take you to a solution. Whose fault is it? Who’s to blame? You can spend hours on that and solve nothing.”

Advice that perhaps you’ll only get from Hayek Pinault in these pages. She’s tech-averse and leery of AI—“it takes away your intelligence because the brain grows lazy”—uses social media sparingly and doesn’t even own a computer. “I write everything by hand. I have papers everywhere. I barely touch the phone. They cannot profile me,” she says. “I don’t buy online. I don’t order food online. The artificial intelligence doesn’t know me.”

A gym doesn’t know her either. She’s one of those rare birds who doesn’t have to exercise to maintain her figure (but she does avoid sugar, citing her family’s history of diabetes). “Four times a year, I put music on and walk on my own treadmill,” she says. “Don’t ask me to run; my boobs are not made for that.” She’s content with the current state of her curves—not thrilled, but content, she states. “I don’t look at somebody else and say, ‘I want that body,’ or ‘I want a new body.’ But I do confess, I want the old body; the one I had at 25 and criticized and hated nonstop.” She clasps her hands in prayer and tilts her head towards the heavens. “Oh, please, Lord Jesus, give it back to me. I apologize.”

We’re having so much fun lamenting the effects of gravity and childbearing on our respective physiques, I’m reluctant to kill the mood and ask Hayek Pinault about the Trump administration’s mass deportations and the president’s disparaging comments about Mexicans and other minority communities. “It makes me sad that the wrong information is being put out there so easily to accomplish hate,” she says. “It makes me sad for my people. So easily being able to say anything irresponsibly, there’s a lack of decency in doing that. And it’s normally done to take away the dignity of others.”

Hayek Pinault’s humanitarian efforts with organizations like UNICEF and the Kering Foundation have informed her work in paying it forward. “Nobody wants charity,” she says. “They just want an environment where they can have a dignified life. You cannot give someone their dignity, but you can make an effort to create the environment for everyone to have dignity. Justice should be about that.” It’s a worldview she continues to instill in her family. “I’ve sat with refugees in a tent and had tea with them. And I’ve sat in Buckingham Palace with the Queen. I have that spectrum, and I try to give it to my children.”

Hayek Pinault has a slew of new projects on the horizon. Ventanarosa recently sold “a big movie to Sony,” she says, and a major streamer just picked up their series about the college experience of a Latino student in America. Their HBO series, Like Water for Chocolate, based on the romance novel, has been renewed for a second season. She’s also just finished writing her first feature (“It’s meaningful. It has a great rhythm. It’s full of surprises to the very end”) which she’ll direct, and her company plans to produce; it’s only the second vehicle she’s created for herself. “I think I’ve earned the right after 25 years of doing it for others,” she says.

The morning has slipped into late afternoon and as Hayek Pinault readies herself for the evening, I’m reminded of the advice that Hayek Pinault says she often gives young actresses about successfully navigating the industry. “You have to be a person outside of the work, a person that you want to be with,” she tells them. “It’s okay to [have all of] the jobs, as long as you hear a song a day, as long as you don’t forget to smell the flowers or grow them, as long as you cook something for yourself (even if you don’t know how to cook), as long as you dance, and sing in the shower.”

As for Hayek Pinault’s future plans and hints of retirement, “I don’t know,” she says, mulling it over. “My brain, it’s a machine gun of ideas. I have too many. I’m super creative. So that will never stop.” And why would she? A woman of Hayek Pinault’s age is just getting started.

Photographer: Claire Rothstein | Stylist: Justin Hamilton | Hair Stylist: Miguel Perez | Makeup Artist: Sofia Schwarzkopf-Tilbury | Manicurist: Kate Williamson at Caren using The GelBottle Inc | DP: David Meadows | Production: NM Productions | Set Designer: Josh Stovell

Editor's Note: This article states that only two Latinas have ever won an Oscar in the best supporting actress category, however, since publication, Zoe Saldaña won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role in Emilia Peréz, taking the total to three.

This story appears in Marie Claire's 2025 Craftsmanship Issue.