In one of the most vivid accounts yet of US film producer Harvey Weinstein’s alleged abuse and harassment, actor Salma Hayek said the disgraced movie mogul turned the making of her 2002 passion project, the Frida Kahlo biopic Frida, into a nightmare after the actress refused Weinstein’s relentless advances.
“For years, he was my monster,” Hayek wrote in an op-ed published on Wednesday by the New York Times.
Her refusals — of massages, showers and sex — enraged him, she wrote.
Photo: AP
“I don’t think he hated anything more than the word ‘no,’” Hayek wrote.
Hayek, who regularly starred in films released by Weinstein’s Miramax in the 1990s, credited Weinstein with helping her start her career, but she said that the movie mogul would turn up at her door “at all hours of the night, hotel after hotel, location after location.”
When Hayek brought Frida, which she was producing, to Miramax to distribute, Weinstein made outrageous demands as payback.
Hayek said he insisted on rewrites, more financing and, most heinously to her, a sex scene with full frontal nudity.
He even threatened to kill her, she said.
To finish what was a labor of love for Hayek, she agreed, but she said she had a nervous breakdown while shooting the scene.
“My body wouldn’t stop crying and convulsing,” Hayek wrote. “It was not because I would be naked with another woman, it was because I would be naked with her for Harvey Weinstein.”
Even still, Weinstein initially refused to give the movie a theatrical release. He eventually relented after pressure from director Julie Taymor and Hayek. It went on to gross US$56.3 million worldwide and land six Oscar nominations, winning two.
In a statement through a spokesperson on Wednesday, Weinstein denied Hayek’s depiction of their relationship and said the battles on Frida were “creative friction.”
“All of the sexual allegations as portrayed by Salma are not accurate and others who witnessed the events have a different account of what transpired,” the statement said.
“Mr Weinstein does not recall pressuring Salma to do a gratuitous sex scene with a female costar and he was not there for the filming,” the statement said. “However, that was part of the story, as Frida Kahlo was bisexual and the more significant sex scene in the movie was choreographed by Ms Hayek with Geoffrey Rush.”
Dozens of women have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment and numerous women have said he raped them.
Weinstein is under investigation for sexual assault in four cities.
“Why do so many of us, as female artists, have to go to war to tell our stories when we have so much to offer? Why do we have to fight tooth and nail to maintain our dignity?” Hayek said in her op-ed. “I think it is because we, as women, have been devalued artistically to an indecent state, to the point where the film industry stopped making an effort to find out what female audiences wanted to see and what stories we wanted to tell.”
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