‘From Dusk Til’ Dawn’ and the “most challenging” scene of Salma Hayek’s career

Posted On September 2, 2025September 2, 2025

Salma Hayek has subjected herself to many, many challenging scenes in her career, but for her money, none were more difficult than the one that required her to overcome a deep-seated phobia.

Hayek first exploded onto the Hollywood scene in the 1990s when she starred in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado. For the first few years after that, though, the beautiful and alluring Latina became mired in roles that couldn’t have been more “male gaze-y” if they had tried. This is why, in 2002, she did everything she could to escape that image by starring in Frida.

That biopic of the monobrowed Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was Hayek’s first real opportunity to flex her dramatic muscles, and it netted her a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar nomination. This would have seemed impossible when she was playing sexy damsels in piss-poor blockbusters like Wild Wild West, but with Frida‘s harrowing scenes of love, loss, chronic pain, and amputated limbs, she proved she had the dramatic chops necessary to be viewed as a great actor, first and foremost.

However, despite Frida putting her through the emotional and physical wringer, Hayek claimed to IGN that it wasn’t her most challenging role. “Frida was a joy,” she claimed. “I couldn’t wait every day to get to the set, although I was exhausted, and have my leg get cut off or lose the baby.” Instead, Hayek revealed the scene that first scorched her image into the minds of moviegoers in 1996 – and arguably cursed her to the years she spent being viewed as a sexual object – was her biggest challenge.

Indeed, when Hayek slinked onto the stage at the Titty Twister bar in From Dusk till Dawn, wearing only a bikini and an enormous Burmese python around her shoulders, audiences were mesmerised. The scene is captivating, sexy, a bit ridiculous, and hypnotic all at once, and the confidence Hayek oozes as the elaborately-named ‘Santanica Pandemonium’ almost blazes through the screen. 

For Hayek, though, that confidence is arguably the greatest magic trick she’s ever pulled as an actor, because she was absolutely petrified while shooting the sequence. For starters, she performed with a real python, and this forced her to overcome her abiding phobia of snakes. How does one get past a fear of slithery reptiles while having a huge one writing around their neck? Worse, how do they do that while also acting like the sexiest person in history? Easy! They hypnotise themselves.

This may sound like a radical tactic, but when Hayek threw herself into research in an attempt to overcome her fears, she discovered that, in some cultures, snakes are metaphors for a person’s inner power. It suddenly hit her like a lightning bolt to the brain: she just needed to tell herself she wasn’t dancing on stage with a snake. Instead, she was dancing with her own self-confidence and inner strength. Doing this would allow her to enter a trance-like state, but would also lend the dance some meaning, instead of it being titillation for titillation’s sake.

“I went to the extent that I created a relationship with this snake,” Hayek revealed with a completely straight face. “I mean, in my mind, it had to have a meaning so that I could go into a trance. I had to go to hypnosis. It was months of preparation for that one dance. And to me, it wasn’t a dance, it was a ritual.”

In the end, Hayek was able to overcome the challenge, shoot the scene, and watch as it became genuinely iconic. She’d never do it again, though, as she laughed, “To have to put on a bikini and dance with a snake that’s 11 feet long and make it organic? That was really, really challenging.”

Related Topics