Salma Hayek: One-Woman Heat Wave

Hmmm, I'm guessing that if these two actually heated each other up offscreen back then, as journalists hinted, the heat's off now. "I do have to say, though," continues Hayek, "that Matthew is very, very clever--for his age, especially." Meaning? "I hadn't worked with anybody who had everything so figured out before he got there. He was really smart about taking the script and finding out where the jokes were. I try to live the moment. Comedians study their scripts, going, 'Dot-dot-dot, joke here, dot-dot-dot, joke there, I do this line up, I do this line down.' I was lost at the beginning. It worked out great with Matthew, though. It was a perfect balance, somehow, because it was what the characters were about. My character is a lot more sensitive, centered, with a lot of emotions and a different depth to her. With his character, everything is on the surface-- he's funny, sarcastic and really a jerk. So, I say they did a hell of a job with the casting."

Because the film is a romantic comedy, she and Perry do kiss in it. I ask how Hayek would rate him, along with such other costars as Antonio Banderas, Laurence Fishburne and Russell Crowe, with whom she stars in the upcoming independent film Breaking Up. "All of them have been good kissers, but you tend to judge these things with your head when it's for a movie, which is not what you do with a real kiss," she observes.

"Laurence kissed me the way his character was supposed to. Antonio really kissed me because his character really kissed me. Matthew really kissed me--a lot. He's one terrific kisser. I must tell you that this English actor that I worked with on [TNT's] The Hunchback, Edward Atterton, who plays the poet Gringoire, well, I couldn't kiss him enough. He's absolutely beautiful and of all the actors I'd want to go back and kiss some more, it would be him. By the end of the movie, I was, like, 'Oh, my God, I wish we could just kiss and kiss.' He has a girlfriend, so I had to keep my mouth shut. But the one person in a movie that I got into kissing the most was Russell Crowe. He completely throws himself into the character and you can't escape him. He was like, 'Aarrrrgghhh!'-- absolutely there."

Hayek is just as emphatic about the movie she and Crowe made together. She describes the small-budget Breaking Up, which is about a couple who can't live together or apart, as "the number one script I fell in love with after Desperado. Once I fall in love, that's the end of it. See, right after I finished the movie with Antonio, I didn't have a job for the longest time until it came out. When Desperado opened, I was offered some commercial things, but I didn't think they were that great to begin with. This small film I really wanted to do."

For all the heat on-screen and in her career, Hayek appears to be one of those knockouts who spends, at least at the moment, many nights at home ordering in and reading scripts or watching American Movie Classics.

"Listen, I don't think I'm going to find anybody in this city, where everyone is too hectic, too unhappy about where they are in life," she tells me, dropping her voice from scratchy Cardinale to throbbingly contralto Sophia Loren, while daintily dipping a fingertip into the honey jar again, and slipping it into her mouth. "I must say, though, that I'm not going to have a boyfriend until I find one who has bigger balls than I do. So, I'm going to have to be checking, looking around to make certain first." With that, she lifts herself up slightly over the table to ease a playful, judgmental glance below my belt, then casts a surreptitious gaze at the crotches of waiters passing by, in a knowing parody of the way guys check out women's anatomies. We're both laughing.

"I'm going to make a confession to you I've never made before," she says. "I try to be--no, I am--very independent. I'm the easiest girl in the world to get rid of. If you don't call me once when you say you will or if I don't think you're calling enough, I think you're not interested and I just walk away. I'm tough like that. The truth of the matter is, though, I am sort of needy--I just don't show it. I would really like to find someone."

What sort of someone? "I never want it to be someone in the movie business." she says, sighing, "but, then again, I want somebody who will understand the things that go on in this business. I mean, this career is crazy. Sometimes I think I have met someone who is like what I'm looking for, but they turn out to be not right at all. The better I do, the tougher it's getting to be because the guys who aren't making as much money or aren't as successful as me get uncomfortable about that. The guys who are making as much money or are as successful as me are, in my experience, really, really screwed up. Or else they always want something bigger, something better. I was spoiled by Mama, I was spoiled by Papa. I hope to God I keep being spoiled by every man I meet in my life. I've never been into being spoiled materially, but I'm getting older and I think it's about time I gave it a try."

To further her effort, has Hayek gotten caught up at all in this town's relentless, all-fun-all-the-time party scene? "I went once to a party at a bar on Sunset," she says. "There were so many girls in little, tiny outfits looking around with hungry eyes. The men weren't looking at these women as if saying, 'How beautiful.' They had no respect, no love. I was not impressed. This was not a party at all--this felt like a market." Not a market, obviously, at which Hayek would find the right sort of person. "I don't want the pressure on my back of 'I'm looking for someone.' I like to go out with my friends and all, but if I meet someone, when it happens, it happens. Look, I'm going to admit something else: I'm not going to be picky anymore. I just want someone that's nice to me, doesn't have that many complications in his life, someone who doesn't drive me crazy, who doesn't try too hard to make himself interesting to me, someone who isn't afraid of me."

Afraid of the woman who had the moxie to leave stardom in Latin America and spend a solid year and a half studying English in preparation for a Hollywood career? Or afraid of the woman who had the strength to pass up, after Desperado, the lead in a $70 million movie to instead do a tiny independent movie that only recently found a distributor? Or afraid of the woman who appeared on a magazine cover clad in a froth of whipped cream and a $1 million Cartier diamond ring? Or afraid of the actress who plays characters like Santanico Pandemonium, the vampire who enslaved George Clooney by growling, "You will eat bugs, you will be my slave"?

Just on the off chance a guy this ballsy may not be waiting offscreen on every street corner, I ask Hayek which one of her costars might be most like her ideal. "You're going to think I'm crazy," she asserts, laughing. "Richard Harris made The Hunchback with me. I could die from Richard Harris. I heard terrible, terrible things about working with him, but nobody on that movie was more loved by the time we finished. I'm finding that Irish people and Mexicans have a lot of things in common. Most of the other actors that I have worked with are very smart, very cool, very professional, very diplomatic. Not Richard Harris. If there was a problem, he was either on one side or another. I love that about a man. He is magnificent, passionate beyond explanation, with such vigor, such convictions, always there to listen to you, to tell you brilliant stories. This I know is the kind of man that, under different times and circumstances, would be dangerous. If I found somebody like that, somebody of my age, I would fall for him immediately."

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