Salma Hayek Pinault Says Typecasting Stopped Her Being Smart and Funny in Movies: 'You're Sexy'

Alexander Tamargo/Getty Images Salma Hayek

Salma Hayek Pinault is speaking out about her treatment in Hollywood.

After scoring her breakthrough role as bikini-and-snake-wearing Santánico Pandemonium in From Dusk Till Dawn alongside George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, Hayek Pinault, 56, said she was "typecast" in similar roles to the 1996 film.

"My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn't give me comedies," Hayek Pinault — who last month revealed she wanted to use her full married name — said in a recent interview with GQ Hype.

"They said, 'You're sexy, so you're not allowed to have a sense of humor,'" Hayek Pinault added. "Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the '90s."

In 2002, Hayek Pinault earned an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Frida Kahlo in Frida, yet even then the career evolution she hoped for didn't happen.

"The types of roles that people offered me did not change at all," she told GQ Hype. "I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no."

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This all changed when The Eternals star was cast by Adam Sandler in the 2010 movie Grown Ups — a change she told GQ Hype happened partly because "I was in my forties!"

She is now starring alongside Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance, which opens in theaters Feb. 10 — and is more than satisfied with the roles she's being allowed to play.

"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," said Hayek Pinault.

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In the third installment of Tatum's stripper franchise, Hayek Pinault plays Magic Mike's love interest. But even as she steps back into a romantic role, the actress said her character's storyline is about much more than just love.

"More than being a movie about an older woman falling in love with a younger guy, it's about a middle-aged woman that has a lot of potential and is sick of being undermined her entire life," Hayek Pinault said.

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Alexander Tamargo/Getty Salma Hayek and Channing Tatum

Tatum, 42, who teased he wanted the third movie to be "the Super Bowl of stripping" in conversation with PEOPLE last year, said that Magic Mike 3 needed a strong female at the center.

"I want to have an equal, if not even more centralized female character for Mike to really play off of and almost to," he told PEOPLE last year. "I don't want to say, [to have her] take the baton, but really let the movie be about a female's experience and not Mike's experience, because it has been so much about Mike and the guys' experiences. These movies are very, very female-forward. At least that is our intention."

Hayek Pinault is just as satisfied with the role Tatum crafted.

"It's the strongest love story, the strongest female character, from beginning to end," Hayek Pinault told PEOPLE in December 2022 about her role. "How lucky am I?"

Read the full feature online at GQ Hype now.