Salma Hayek credits Grown Ups costar Adam Sandler for helping her escape typecasting

Salma Hayek has the range, thank you very much, and it appears Adam Sandler was one of the first to see that.

The Oscar-nominated star looked back at her career in a new interview with GQ UK published Monday, noting that she was "typecast for a long time" because of her looks. It wasn't until her turn in Sandler's 2010 comedy Grown Ups that she began to land more comedic roles, Hayek said.

"My entire life I wanted to do comedy and people wouldn't give me comedies," Hayek said. "I couldn't land a role until I met Adam Sandler, who put me in a comedy, 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," Hayek said.

It saddened her 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 said. "So I'm not sad, I'm not angry; I'm laughing."

Hayek had hoped that her turn in the 2002 Frida Kahlo biopic Frida, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, would change things. "When I was nominated for an Oscar, the types of roles that people offered me did not change at all," she said. "I really struggled and I thought that was going to change, but no."

In an essay for The New York Times published in 2017, Hayek recalled being told by convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein — who distributed the film via his company Miramax — that "the only thing I had going for me was my sex appeal." She wrote, "He told me he was going to shut down the film because no one would want to see me in that role."

Academy voters disagreed, and Hayek has gone on to star in a variety of genres since, including comedies Grown Ups 2, Sausage Party, Drunk Parents, and Like a Boss. She'll next appear in Magic Mike's Last Dance opposite Channing Tatum (in theaters Feb. 10), proving that she truly got the last laugh — and, even better, lap dance.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• Salma Hayek got her first ever lap dance from Channing Tatum while filming Magic Mike's Last Dance
• Matthew Perry says Salma Hayek gave him elaborate acting advice that didn't make any sense
• Channing Tatum gets felt up by Salma Hayek in Magic Mike's Last Dance first look