Salma Hayek Pinault Was Told She Was Too 'Sexy' For Comedy Until Adam Sandler's Grown Ups Came Along
As a producer, Adam Sandler has always managed to attract an impressive litany of talent. Although the films released through Sandler's studio, Happy Madison, regularly get terrible reviews, they tend to be very lucrative and high-profile actors keep coming back for more work. This may be because, as the rumor mill has it, Sandler is a relentlessly decent and kind human being that others love to work with. As such, Al Pacino can be seen in "Jack and Jill," Susan Sarandon appeared in "That's My Boy," and the likes of Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Aniston, and Winona Ryder have all played Sandler's wife or love interest in his movies.
In Dennis Dugan's 2010 film "Grown Ups," Salma Hayek Pinault plays Roxanne, a successful fashion designer, and the wife of a talent agent named Lenny (Sandler). "Grown Ups" is about how Lenny is still very close with the circle of male friends he met when they were children, and how, even after marrying and having kids, they are still essentially the same people. Their relationships are all more or less genial, and Roxanne understands her husband and her husband's foibles. It wasn't Pinault's first comedy — that would be Andy Tennant's 1997 rom-com "Fools Rush In" — but it was certainly her first comedy to be so broad and silly.
Pinault certainly feels that "Grown Ups" represented a pivot point in her career, proving that she was capable of broad farces. Thereafter, she began to appear in a wider variety of films, and, by 2023, has achieved mastery over working on the types of films she wants. She explained as much in an interview with GQ, where the actor revealed the previous limitations producers put on her.
Typecasting
In that interview, Salma Hayek Pinault explained that she felt that, for far too long, she was typecast. She said she always dreamed of being funny, but merely because of the way she looked, she was too often cast as the romantic interest secondary to the lead. Her first U.S. breakout role probably came in Robert Rodriguez's "Desperado" in 1995, and the rest of the decade was marked by downbeat indie dramas ("Breaking Up," "The Velocity of Gary"), wild Hollywood action thrillers ("Fair Game," "Fled," "Wild Wild West"), or — in two cases — movies where Pinault played strippers (a demonic one in "From Dusk Till Dawn," an angelic one in "Dogma"). Pinault noted:
"I was typecast for a long time. [...] My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn't give me comedies. I couldn't land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy, but I was in my 40s! They said, 'You're sexy, so you're not allowed to have a sense of humor.' [...] Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the '90s."
By 2010, Pinault had already produced and starred in Julie Taymor's Frida Kahlo biography "Frida," appeared in Taymor's Beatles tribute film "Across the Universe," and starred in several high-profile Hollywood dramas and kid adventure films, yet comedy was seemingly far off her agent's radar. After "Grown Ups," Pinault would also appear in "Here Comes the Boom," the action comedy "The Hitman's Bodyguard," and, of course, "Grown Ups 2." She also played a comedic villain in "Like a Boss," lording hilariously over the likes of Tiffany Haddish and Rose Byrne. These were in addition to comedic voice performances in "Puss in Boots" and "Sausage Party."
'I'm laughing, girl.'
The typecasting, Salma Hayek Pinault said, continued even after her Oscar nomination for "Frida." She recalled, "When I was nominated for an Oscar the types of roles that people offered me did not change at all. I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no." Happy Madison, it seems, did what the Academy could not.
Pinault's newest film, "Magic Mike's Last Dance," is due in theaters on February 10, 2023. The actor, now 56, feels vindicated. After a difficult first decade in the business, she believes she's hit her stride, and can now face the struggles with good humor and a twinge of righteous indignation. In a business that famously offers scant job variety to women previously dubbed sexpots (see also: Megan Fox), Pinault followed her bliss, took the roles she wanted, produced her own movies (through the repeated badgering and attempted assaults of Harvey Weinstein), and remains a Hollywood A-player to this day. As she put it:
"I was sad at the time, but now here I am doing every genre, in a time in my life where they told me I would have expired — that the last 20 years I would have been out of business. So I'm not sad, I'm not angry; I'm laughing. [...] I'm laughing, girl."
Pinault has, as of this writing, signed on to co-star with Anne Hathaway in "Seesaw Monster," a mystery film based a novel by Kotaro Isaka, set for release on Netflix. She seems to be comfortably ensconced at the top.