The Mexican actress Salma Hayek channels the happiness that reigns in her personal life through comedies like Here Comes the Boom, and affirms that at 46 she has left her most "melodramatic" stage behind and prefers to make the viewer laugh.
"Maybe before it was more difficult for me to make people laugh. Now it's the other way around. It's hard for me to cry. The truth is that I'm very happy to be happy," said the interpreter, who has been married since 2009 to the Frenchman François-Henri Pinault, with whom she has a daughter. Valentina is five years old.
"When I was young I was much more melodramatic. Being an actress, there were times when I even enjoyed pain, suffering a little. Well, I didn't enjoy it, but I had a tendency towards melodrama. I was good at making people cry. When now I have a character that suffers, with which you have to get into corners and search, I do it without any problem, but I like doing comedies more," he said.
In Here Comes the Boom, budget cuts threaten to shut down an American high school music program, until a biology professor (Kevin James) starts raising money working as a mixed martial arts fighter.
Salma Hayek, who had already worked with James in Grown Ups (2010), plays Bella, the school nurse for whom the protagonist drinks the winds and for whom she will become her main support.
She enjoys working with James so much that she has just finished filming the sequel to Grown Ups, where she meets him and another symbol of American comedy: Adam Sandler.
"What I like the most about them is their ability to improvise," said the actress from Veracruz. "I don't have to master my lines of dialogue perfectly because I know they can change. They allow me to be very creative. They listen to me and ask for my opinion, and I know I have a partner with them during scenes. That's fantastic and hard to do", he stated.
Her character in Here Comes the Boom is the antithesis of the image of some of her most famous works (Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn) and even others as recent as Americano (2011), where she played a prostitute and stripper.
"I tend to get characters that are like that, not that I'm trying to add it. As a high school nurse, In fact, if you have that job you have to be a little careful and demure." Hayek explained.
Salma Hayek good command of English
She, however, has been working in the United States for 20 years and her brain "already learned the little way" to speak English with almost perfect fluency.
"I have worked much more in English than in Spanish as an actress, so I got used to it. At first, it seemed strange to me to act in that language, although it doesn't take so much work anymore. Of course, I suffer with some words from time to time. there are days when I get up and my tongue doesn't want to speak English," he declared.
Salma Hayek, an icon of Latino power in Hollywood, was pleased that in recent weeks films like End of Watch and Hotel Transylvania, with Michael Peña and Selena Gómez respectively, have led the US box office.
Salma Hayek has been very successful of late with Grown Ups and Puss in Boots.
"We Latinos have achieved a constant presence in American cinema. At first, it didn't exist. Then one came out from time to time. Now they come out frequently and it's important. It's not a fad, it's not that there's an actor or two. They have us considered as part of the United States. That's what I was fighting for," he stressed. "We can't live in a culture where 50 million people are Hispanic and have no representation in the movies as if they didn't exist."
