Summer isn’t here yet, but Salma Hayek posted a gorgeous teaser of what to look forward to in the season ahead on Instagram. The 56-year-old actress casually shared photos of her climbing a ladder out of the ocean in a yellow bikini during golden hour. “Every time I need to feel renewed I jump into the ocean 🌊” she captioned the shot. In its first four hours up, the Instagram post accrued over 960,000 likes.
This isn’t Hayek’s first time posting a bikini photo that caught the internet’s attention. She shared one in January 2022 that garnered over 2.2 million likes.
Hayek spoke to British GQ in February about her history in Hollywood and being pigeonholed into sexy roles when she wanted to do more comedic ones. “I was typecast for a long time,” she said. “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.’ Not only are you not allowed to be smart, but you were not allowed to be funny in the ’90s.”
“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,” she continued. “So I’m not sad, I’m not angry; I’m laughing,” she said, while “clearly not laughing,” per British GQ. “I’m laughing, girl.”
Senior News and Strategy Editor
Alyssa Bailey is the senior news and strategy editor at ELLE.com, where she oversees coverage of celebrities and royals (particularly Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton). She previously held positions at InStyle and Cosmopolitan. When she’s not working, she loves running around Central Park, making people take #ootd pics of her, and exploring New York City.