Tale of Tales

Salma Hayek starred in Matteo Garrone’s 2015 film Tale of Tales.

In one of the initial scenes, her character, the Queen of Longtrellis, eats the heart of an aquatic monster, in order to get pregnant. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the actress admitted that when she read the script “I thought it was really too grotesque,” and that they ended up repeating the scene a total of nine times. She said: “He had to cut twice because I was gagging. But I never knew there were so many ways to eat a heart.” Shockingly, Salma added that in the end, she never knew what this sea creature’s ‘heart’ was made of.

She explained: “It was a combination of many different products. But what made all the most disgusting is that they wouldn’t tell me what it actually was.”