The benefits of any actor securing staunch supporters and close allies very early on in their career can’t be overstated, with Salma Hayek finding one the very first time she ventured outside of her native Mexico to try her luck in Hollywood.
The first American production of her career came in Robert Rodriguez’s smouldering sleeper hit Desperado, which was only the fourth film credit of her professional life. The two quickly hit it off and became regular collaborators, which was instrumental in establishing Hayek in Stateside cinema.
She followed it up by reuniting with the filmmaker on his segment of anthology feature Four Rooms, sizzled as the iconic Santanico Pandemonium in Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s genre-bending cult classic From Dusk till Dawn, reunited with the director once again on The Faculty, before her association with studio Miramax – which backed all three – led her towards Kevin Smith’s Dogma.
It was a mutually beneficial ongoing partnership, with Hayek and Rodriguez re-teaming twice more on the 2003 duo of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Tarantino would have been thrilled to script a scene where he drinks tequila from her feet for obvious reasons, but the character only existed because of a last-minute cameo the star was completely ill-equipped and unprepared to pull off.
Credited as ‘TV Dancing Girl’ in Four Rooms, it was hardly a massive role, but it was an important one nonetheless after it led directly to one of her most memorable turns. “I was not in that movie at all,” she admitted to GQ. “And one morning, I’m woken up at like five in the morning. I’m on the phone like, ‘What? Hello? What happened? And Robert says, ‘I need you to come right now to the set. I need you to do me a favour.'”
As it turned out, Rodriguez needed someone to perform as a stripper in ‘The Misbehavers’ segment, but all the strippers he’d auditioned were far too professional. Because there were going to be children watching the dancer on television, the filmmaker didn’t want the dancer to be too sultry or saucy.
“I’m like, ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’ve never done that before. I don’t know how to do it,'” Hayek continued. “And he goes, ‘That’s why I want you.'” Thanks to her complete lack of knowledge on how to perform like a stripper, Rodriguez obviously determined that she was the ideal candidate to play a stripper.
Having helmed the final chapter ‘The Man from Hollywood’, Tarantino’s involvement in Four Rooms led neatly into the screenplay he was writing when he witnessed Hayek’s ill-prepared stripper. “But, anyway, Quentin saw it,” she explained. “And that’s where he got the idea to write Santanico Pandemonium.”
There was, of course, the whole issue with Hayek being terrified of snakes, but once she’d overcome that fear thanks to some tough love from Tarantino, the vampiric exotic dancer instantly became one of her most recognisable characters.
