Salma Hayek admits she's never seen her horror movie 'The Faculty'
"I hate horror films, and I don't watch them," says the actress.
Let’s make one thing clear: You don’t actually have to like horror movies to be one of our annual MVPs of Horror… so long as you’ve starred in great one.
For Salma Hayek, there have been a couple, both directed by Robert Rodriguez, the filmmaker from Austin, Texas, for whom Hayek has long been a muse. First there was 1996’s vampire shoot-’em-up From Dusk Till Dawn, a film famous for Hayek’s seductive snake dance, which the actress confessed to us she doesn’t remember shooting because she fell under a trance to film it.
Then there’s The Faculty, Rodriguez’s 1998 teen fright fest about a high school overrun by alien parasites that kill and then pose as the teachers. Hayek played the memorable role of the school’s under-the-weather nurse Rosa Harper, who gets murdered by their possessed gym teacher (Robert Patrick) while students Delilah (Jordana Brewster) and Casey (Elijah Wood) look on.
Not that Hayek ever saw her on-screen slaying.
“Oh, I hate horror films, and I don’t watch them,” Hayek told us during a Role Recall interview (watch above). “It was tough for me to do [The Faculty] because of that. I don’t understand them very well. It’s a genre that I just don’t get into.”
Hayek is only vaguely aware of her character’s grisly death, in which Patrick’s Coach Willis extends his gnarly long alien tongue into her ear, seemingly squashing her brain. (She soon re-animates as an evil alien.)
“I’ve never watched it, I don’t even remember it,” she admitted. “Somebody kills me, I know. I remember it was awful.”
For Wood, on the other hand, the film only helped to reinforce his love of horror after having appeared in the 1993 thriller The Good Son.
“It was the first time I had ever been to Austin, totally fell in love with Austin, [and] moved there many, many, many years later,” Wood, who began acting at 7, told us in a Role Recall interview (watch below). “I remember going out to dinner with people and my mom not necessarily going, so there was a sort of expression of independence for the first time. And in that city it felt really cool.”
“That was a really formative experience,” continues Wood, who in recent years has produced oft-kilter genre films like Cooties (2014), The Greasy Strangler (2016), Mandy (2018) and Daniel Isn't Real (2018) and starred in the film Come to Daddy (2020) and Showtime’s acclaimed series Yellowjackets.
“And it was so fun getting a chance to work with Robert, who had a very different approach than any other director that I’d worked with. … Loved it.”
The Faculty celebrates its 25th anniversary this December.
