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“Let me tell you something,” says Salma Hayek Pinault, leaning towards me. The afternoon light filters into the glass box of her living room, so airy and luminous that it feels like we’re floating in the trees above Bel Air. “Wikipedia had my name as Salma Walderrama Hayek. I’ve never heard that word before in my life. I don’t even know if it’s an actual name or someone just made up a word.”
“Did we take it out?” she calls to her assistant in the next room, pausing to sip from a perspiring mug of ginger tea. In a room heady with the scent of burning fig candles, Hayek Pinault, dressed in a black crochet cardigan and fuzzy platform sliders, appears supernatural. At her feet her bleach-white dog, Lobito (meaning ‘little wolf’), is eyeing the plate of emoji-perfect chocolate chip cookies on the table between us.
Also on the table is an assortment of remedies designed to ward off the illness Hayek Pinault has come down with over the last few days. There are tissues, herbal teas, and a white platter of tangerines that you feel healthier just for looking at; and beside them all, Salma Hayek Pinault, professionally ignoring the borderline fever that is coming and going.
She sighs, then returns to the Wikipedia page she had mentally bookmarked. “They also say that I speak like ten languages. I do speak four very badly, but they got the wrong ones. That one I’m tempted not to correct,” she says with a private smile.
Wikipedia’s confusion about who Salma Hayek Pinault is reflects some of the struggle she’s endured trying to explain herself during her career. This despite being a Hollywood mainstay for almost three decades, both starring in and producing landmark television and films. Now, at 56, with a role as the romantic lead in Steven Soderbergh’s final Magic Mike movie and another in Angelina Jolie’s forthcoming trauma drama Without Blood, she no longer cares about convincing anyone.
“Sometimes they build you up, sometimes they bring you down. What are you gonna do?”