Actress Salma Hayek revealed that she was injured by a spider monkey while filming Frida, the biggest movie of her career, in 2002. She earned an Academy Award nomination in 2003 and the best reviews of her career for playing the iconoclastic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo.
The 53-year-old actress candidly revealed that the shoot wasn't all fun and games in a video released, on January 10, in honour of Like A Boss hitting theatres everywhere.
She said the monkey attacked her onset, leaving her body "severely injured," but her spirit as brave as ever. Later that year she also had to do a photoshoot with the same monkey. A photo of Salma and Tyson the monkey appeared in a list of her 13 most iconic looks.
"This next one is 2002 when I did Frida and this was in Vogue and I was very proud to be part of Vogue for the first time in my life," she says in the video.
"This monkey, who was named Tyson, actually attacked me during the filming of Frida and I was really severely injured," Salma said. "But I was brave enough to let him come back and work again in the movie and then I still did a photoshoot with him for Vogue afterward." She offered one last quirky quip on the subject: "I was really hoping he wouldn't go for my face."
Hayek is no stranger to monkeys
In the year 2015, she revealed her "Desperado" co-star Antonio Banderas once gifted her two monkeys and she named them Mariachi and Carolina. She made her confession on the Jimmy Kimmel late-night show that "I had fallen in love with these two monkeys that were supposed to be in the movie 'Desperado' and then they got cut out," she said.
"I was spending all my time with them and they were gonna take them away and I was sobbing because they were actually staying with me. I was devastated," she added. The real-life Frida Kahlo had two spider monkeys as pets, one a gift from her husband Diego Rivera. Salma has her own share of less-traditional pets, rescuing close to 50 animals.
