Matthew Perry recalls Salma Hayek's questionable acting advice
In his new memoir, Matthew Perry writes about starring in Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek
Matthew Perry is clearly not afraid to negatively name-drop his fellow celebrities in his new memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. After being raked over the coals for wishing Keanu Reeves dead, a new anecdote from the book pokes fun at co-star Salma Hayek for her methodology on the set of their film Fools Rush In.
Per Entertainment Weekly, Perry writes that he came up with some acting “strategies” to become a leading man. “Salma had tried her best, too—she came into my trailer at the start of the shoot and said, ‘Let’s just spoon a little bit,’” he recalls. “I did my best Chandler impression—the double-take-and-sardonic- stare thing—and said, ‘Oh, OK! Let’s just spoon a little bit!’”
The Friends star generously says that Hayek’s “long-winded ideas weren’t always helpful,” adding, “There’s one scene in which I’m professing my love for her. She suggested that we don’t look at each other—rather, we should look out at our future together. After listening to this nonsense for about twenty minutes, I finally said: ‘Listen, Salma,’ I said, ‘I’m telling you I love you in this scene. You look wherever you want, but I’m going to be looking at you.’”
Despite this—and despite the fact that an injury on the set of this film kicked off his years-long opioid addiction—Perry’s Fools Rush In experience was a positive one. He calls it “probably my best movie,” while director Andy Tennant was “a very smart and incredibly nice guy.”
“I was bouncing around doing my funny little things, and [Tennant] would take me aside and say, ‘You don’t have to do that. You’re interesting enough to watch without doing that,’” he writes. “That line of thinking allowed him to pull out of me one of the best performances of my career. Could this be a different way of saying Matty, you’re enough, the words I’ve been longing to hear my entire life?”