An uninvited guest! Salma Hayek revealed that the party where Angelina Jolie pushed her face into a birthday cake was never meant to happen — and everyone who attended was technically a crasher.
“There was no birthday party,” the Frida star, 55, said during the Thursday, October 14, episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “All of those people were crashers. I said, ‘I don’t want a birthday party this year.’ I had to work all day. [There were 25] people that I told them, ‘There is no birthday party,’ [and they] showed up anyway.”
The Oscar nominee had planned to spend her September 2 birthday without her husband, François-Henri Pinault, and their 14-year-old daughter, Valentina, because she knew she had to work the next day, but her friends weren’t satisfied with that excuse.
“Everybody felt sorry for my loneliness, so they just showed up at my house,” she told Jimmy Kimmel.
One of the partygoers was Jolie, 46, who helped her Eternals costar with an important tradition within Mexican culture. As Hayek explained, the birthday person must take a bite — “la mordida” — of the cake without using their hands.
After hearing that she would have to push the Mexican star’s head into the cake, Jolie balked. “She said, ‘No, no, oh, no, I cannot do that,'” Hayek recalled, adding that the Maleficent star quickly “got over it.”
Kimmel, 53, described the move as more of a “very gentle push,” but after Hayek posted a video of the moment via Instagram last month, Jolie’s cake-shove went viral.
Kumail Nanjiani, who also stars alongside the actresses in Eternals, said that his invitation to the party must have gotten lost in the mail. “I mordida-ed at home,” he joked. “I mordida-ed myself to sleep.”
Earlier this year, Hayek admitted that she was hesitant to meet with Marvel about her role in the forthcoming superhero movie because she was worried about what they might have in mind for a woman her age.
“I said, ‘Forget it,'” she told Entertainment Weekly in August. “I said, ‘God knows what kind of grandmother they want me to play.’ I’m used to being [told] I’m going to be the extra or the old prostitute. And then they said the director was Chloé Zhao, and I said, ‘OK! Let’s have the meeting!'”
Zhao, 39, became the first woman of color to win Best Director at the Oscars in April when she took home the trophy for Nomadland, which also won Best Picture. She was only the second woman to win Best Director at the Academy Awards after Kathryn Bigelow won in 2009 for The Hurt Locker.
