From the moment she arrived in Hollywood, Salma Hayek Pinault was stereotyped as the “sexy” girl, a title she reveals she wasn't able to escape until she was well into her 40s.

The actor discussed how the professional tables have turned with her new film Magic Mike's Last Dance in a new interview with British GQ. “I was typecast for a long time,” she told the magazine. “My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn’t give me comedies. I couldn’t land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy [2010’s Grown Ups], but I was in my forties! They said, ‘You’re sexy, so you’re not allowed to have a sense of humor.’” She added, “Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the ’90s.” When asked if that situation still makes her upset, the actor replied, “I was sad at the time, but now here I am doing every genre, in a time in my life where they told me I would have expired—that the last 20 years I would have been out of business. So I’m not sad, I’m not angry; I’m laughing.”

However, Hayek Pinault explained that her portrayal of Frida Kahlo in Frida (2002) served as a realization for what she could do in her career. Having been obsessed with the artist since she was a teenager, the actor played a personal role in the making of the film, acting as producer, contacting Kahlo's family, and securing the rights to her paintings. She also brought on Harvey Weinstein as co-producer, a harrowing choice she detailed in a 2017 essay for the New York Times. In the article, she detailed how Weinstein had emotionally and sexually harassed her throughout the making of the film. “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,” she wrote, adding that the disgraced producer’s requests for massages and oral sex, and her repeated refusal of those requests, turned his support into a “Machiavellian rage.” She wrote, “In his eyes, I was not an artist. I wasn’t even a person. I was a thing: not a nobody, but a body.” Frida would go on to earn critical acclaim and earn Hayek Pinault an Oscar nomination. However, she told the magazine, “When I was nominated for an Oscar the types of roles that people offered me did not change at all, I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no.”

But things did start to change around 2017 when Mike White, the creator behind The White Lotus, decided that the actor would be perfect for the starring role in his social satire Beatriz at Dinner. In the film, Hayek Pinault plays a massage therapist at a dinner party thrown by her rich clients, navigating the professional limbo space between guest and employee. The movie star said of the opportunity, “They said, ‘We think you’re even more interesting than you think.’ That was exciting because somebody had a plan for me.”