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If you’re a sentient being with access to a television screen, it’s more than likely that you have a formative memory of Salma Hayek. (If not, maybe you have a phone screen and have seen more than one of her gravity-defying bikini photos.) The Mexican actress unbelievably turns 60 on September 2, which means she’s been gracing our screens with her singular beauty for nearly 40 years—starting as a telenovela actress before breaking out into silver screen fame opposite Antonio Banderas in Desperado.
That film’s director, Robert Rodriguez, recently held a series of events at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, giving his loyal fans (Spy Kids, anyone?) a peek behind the curtain of his career. At one such event, he treated audiences to a screening of From Dusk ’Til Dawn, a wild ride written by Quentin Tarantino that he eventually passed off to Rodriguez to direct.
In the 30 years since its debut, the film has earned cult status because, according to Rodriguez, it’s a miracle it ever got made in the first place. From Dusk ’Til Dawn is, effectively, a two-in-one: what starts as a getaway-heist storyline (with George Clooney as the criminal-who-cares and Tarantino playing his perverse, idiot brother) eventually transmogrifies into a vampire thriller. That’s when Salma Hayek enters—and makes film history.
“There was a vampire called Blonde Death that Quentin had always imagined Madonna playing,” Rodriguez told the crowd. “I said, ‘Well, they’re in Mexico, so it should be a Mexican character. What about Salma Hayek?’”
The rest, as they say, is history. Tarantino reworked the script, renaming the vampire “Santanico Pandemonium,” inspired by a Mexican horror film of the same name.
Rodriguez added his own flair to the character—including an 11-foot yellow python and snake dance, which would later be repopularized by Britney Spears at the 2001 MTV VMAs. “I created a relationship with the snake that felt like a ritual,” Hayek said in a previous interview, explaining that she had to partake in hypnotherapy to conquer her fear of the reptile. “It was as if I had to become one with the creature to truly embody Santanico’s power.”
(The scene where Hayek places her foot inside Tarantino’s mouth, pouring liquor on top of it until he drinks from her toes, was likely a Tarantino original—for obvious reasons.)
Hayek’s scene became mythic, not just for her obvious sensuality, but because of how it simultaneously conforms to and subverts the audience’s gaze. By the end of her dance, Santanico Pandemonium turns into a man-eating vampire—claiming the life of Richie (played by Tarantino), a sexual predator who, just a few scenes earlier, raped and murdered a woman in his hotel room. From Dusk ’Til Dawn offers little relief or justice in its gore and unflinching amorality; Santanico offers one of the film’s only reprieves.
From Dusk ’Til Dawn was just one of the many moments in Hayek’s career when she embraced the sensuality in her art. “Sexuality, what other people see in you, is enjoying your body,” she once said. “Involve your senses in your life, and you will become sexy.”
But the best thing about Hayek’s trajectory is—even after the history-making Oscar nomination, the marriage to one of the world’s most influential billionaires—the sexy has never stopped. “There was a time when I was the sexy girl, but thank God age came and gave me the ability to expand to other territories,” she told a reporter last year.
“Although, I’m still sexy and I embrace it.”