She confesses that she wanted to be part of that world, to produce the Frida Kahlo movie, and if it wasn’t for Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney, she could have been raped.
Hayek took on Harvey and rejected him every time he would try to approach her, she said no to visiting her late at night at her hotel room, to taking a shower to him, to a massage, to letting him give her oral sex and with every refusal he became more aggressive and even threatened to take the movie away from her.
“When he was finally convinced that I was not going to earn the movie the way he had expected, he told me he had offered my role and my script with my years of research to another actress. In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.”
At that point she had to resort to using lawyers and even though she didn’t pursue a sexual harassment case, once they started filming, the sexual harassment stopped, but the rage escalated from Harvey.
“We paid the price for standing up to him nearly every day of shooting. Once, in an interview, he said Julie and I were the biggest ball busters he had ever encountered, which we took as a compliment.”
“Halfway through shooting, Harvey turned up on set and complained about Frida’s ‘unibrow.’ He insisted that I eliminate the limp and berated my performance. Then he asked everyone in the room to step out except for me. He told me that the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal and that there was none of that in this movie. So he told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role.”
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