Salma Hayek‘s home is a zoo. The actress, 49, loves animals and frequently takes in strays and rescues, sometimes to the annoyance of her husband, François-Henri Pinault. So when she found another furry friend she just had to save, she came up with a plan to break the news to him.
“I had promised my husband I was gonna stop, because at the time I had 10 dogs, five parrots, I had alpacas, horses, cats — and, by the way, one without a tail, the other one without a leg. And they always find me, they come to me, these animals — which he doesn’t believe me, but they do — and I promised him, no more,” Hayek explains in a preview clip for the June 9 Graham Norton Show.
“We were up to 30 animals,” she says. “I swore no more. And I was [filming in Bulgaria], and a little puppy who was abandoned and was going to die … he came to me, and I couldn’t help it, I picked him up.”
She named him Ochoa, after the Mexican goalie Guillermo Ochoa. And then it occurred to her that she had broken her promise to her husband. “So I came up with this brilliant idea to pretend that I was having an affair,” she tells Norton in the clip. “And at the end I would say, ‘No, it’s not an affair. I picked up a dog.’ And then he would feel better.”
Hayek — who shares a daughter, Valentina, with Pinault — called her husband with an urgent message and said they had something “important to discuss.” When he called back, she put her plan into action.
“I said, ‘Listen, I feel so terrible, I don’t know how to say this to you,'” she recalls. “‘I know this is not going to go down well, and I’m really nervous. Please have mercy on me. Have patience. Be understanding. It’s just, it’s been so stressful, and I’m so tired and I was so lonely here for so many days. And you know you do crazy things when you’re in this state!”
Her husband didn’t take the bait, though. “He said to me, ‘Oh, please, don’t tell me you picked up another dog.'”
Watch the video above!
