Salma Hayek has revealed why she didn’t make the cut for The Matrix.
The actress looked back on her audition for the sci-fi action film during a virtual appearance on Wednesday’s episode Red Table Talk.
Hayek said she first met longtime friend Jada Pinkett-Smith when the two were up for a role in the 1999 film starring Keanu Reeves.
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While Pinkett-Smith played Niobe in some of the Matrix movies, Hayek said she couldn’t handle the physical demands in the audition, and was not asked back.
“Now, I’m flexible, I’m agile, but I’m lazy. I never really went to the gym. And they said to me, ‘You have to run.’ I go, ‘To where?’ ‘Around. You have to run around.’ I couldn’t even go around the room once,” she recalled.
Hayek also detailed what she thought of the RTT co-host when they first met at an audition.
“I was like [panting] and in comes Jada. A mean, lean, sexy machine. Oh, my God! She was so good! It was so embarrassing. She was so freed. She was so focused. She was so disciplined… and I thought to myself, ‘That’s what I wanna be when I grow up,’” Hayek said.
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The two actresses eventually did work together when Hayek directed Jada’s “Nada Se Compara” music video.
“It’s a love song about sex trafficking, and the story is about trusting a man that destroys you, luring you into sex trafficking,” Hayek explained. “And I said, ‘I think it’s important that you are as vulnerable as these women, because the obsession that men have with women’s bodies, it’s really threatening for us.’”
“And so she accepted to be as naked with her body as she was with her voice,” the Frida star said.
Now the 54-year-old actress is starring in the action comedy The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, which is currently in theaters. Hayek said she was able to convince the film’s producers to make her character a woman in her 50s going through menopause.
“It was conceived as maybe a girl in her 40s, but the truth is that I said, ‘Why?’ And I say, ‘Let’s make it a woman in her 50s, and I think we should make it about her having to do all this action while she’s going through menopause,’” she said.
“I think that’s brilliant,” Jada commented.
Hayek also spoke with Jada, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris about the secret to keeping her marriage to French billionaire François-Henri Pinault strong.
Watch the full episode of Facebook Watch series Red Table Talk featuring Salma Hayek below:
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