'Wild, Wild' Woman

'West' sexpot Salma Hayek wants some meatier screen exposure

Sunday, June 27, 1999

By NANCY MILLS

Salma Hayek is ready for many more closeups. Sure, she was handpicked by Will Smith to play the mysterious woman who tantalizes Smith, Kevin Kline and villain Kenneth Branagh in "Wild Wild West," opening Wednesday. But the camera jumps so fast in this action-adventure that she's off-screen more often than she'd like. And she wants to change all that.

"The studios are always surprised and shocked to hear people say they'd like to see more of me," says Hayek, who does manage to display considerable backside cleavage in "West" in a comic pajama scene.

"The studios say, ‘Gosh, when your name comes on the screen, everyone screams.' They've been telling me this for five years, but they still don't get it. I think it's the accent," which is softly South of the Border.

Hayek, who likes to refer to herself irreverently as "a Mexican jumping bean," is gradually wearing them down. Filmmaker Kevin Smith asked her to play a muse in his controversial new movie "Dogma," opening later this year with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And last month, Warner Bros. hired her to play a detective in "Shiny New Enemies," now shooting with Jeff Goldblum.

Leaving nothing to chance, Hayek hired herself as the star and co-producer of "The Velocity of Gary," an independent film about a bisexual love triangle, opening July 16. Her co-stars are Vincent D'Onofrio and Thomas Jane.

"Nobody's going to go see ‘Gary,'" Hayek worries. "I did it for the pleasure of doing a part I wanted to get my teeth into."

Hayek is just 30, but she looks more like a little girl playing dress-up than sexpot Rita Escobar in "Wild Wild West."

"What I responded to in Rita is that she likes adventure," says Hayek, who conducts her onscreen adventures in a variety of chest-displaying outfits. "I liked that she's very naive and, at the same time, clever and manipulative. People really want to see me as a sexy woman, [but] there's more to me than that."

In other words, don't hark back too much to the famous nude love scene she had with Antonio Banderas in his hit 1995 cult film "Desperado." She says she has no intention of capitalizing on her curvy figure.

"I'm against the concept of working out," she says. "I refuse to become part of this perfect-body syndrome. I work so hard that if I have one hour, I want to read, play in the garden, cook or watch a movie. I don't want to go to the gym and smell everyone's sweat and be in pain so I can be accepted by society.

"Everybody tries to make me feel bad about myself. One guy I dated said, ‘You're beautiful, but you're soft.' I said, ‘Very nice to have met you. Goodbye!'"

Hayek finally found someone who appreciated her — English actor Edward Atterton, her co-star in TNT's 1997 "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." They have been together for more than two years.

Her commitment to Atterton, however, doesn't mean that she is now any less committed to her craft.

"I have this overdrive," she says. "From the very beginning, I said, ‘I want to do this.' But the important thing is not that I do it, but that I died knowing that I tried to do it and that I did the best I could. I didn't want to die famous in Mexico knowing that I settled for something I didn't want. How unhappy I'd have been doing one Mexican soap after another. I'd have gone crazy."

Now, eight years later, she's crazy with work. Her production company, Ventanarosa, is developing both Spanish and English projects for her.

"When I'm doing a movie, that's when I relax," Hayek says. "As stressful as it can be, as much pressure as it should be, making movies is still the place where I feel the most at ease and I truly enjoy it. That's why I make so many."

Vitals

Salma Hayek

Born: Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, Sept. 2, 1968

Parents: Sami, in the oil business, and Diana, former opera singer

Sibling: Sami Jr., 27

First Big Break: "Teresa," a Mexican soap opera, in 1991

Movies: "Mi Vida Loca," "Desperado," "From Dusk to Dawn," "Fair Game," "Fools Rush In," "Fled," "54," "The Faculty," "No One Writes to the Colonel"

Turning Point: "I borrowed money from a friend, Elizabeth Avellan, [director] Robert Rodriguez' wife. I didn't even ask for it. She said: ‘I'm not letting you go back to Mexico. It's not just because I'm your friend, but I want to go pay $7.50 to see you in movies because that's how talented you are.' Thanks to her, I stayed."