See Salma Hayek Devour A Monster’s Heart In Twisted Fairy Tale Movie ‘Tale of Tales’ [Video]

Salma Hayek’s new fairy tale film definitely isn’t aimed at young Disney fans — it’s a visual feast that brings fairy tales back to their very dark roots.

Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales is getting rave reviews after making its debut at Cannes, and one of its most buzzed-about scenes features Salma Hayek’s barren queen character heartily devouring the heart of a sea monster. While talking about the film, Salma revealed that consuming the anatomically-correct heart was as disgusting as it looks.

“We have to talk about this,” Salma said of the heart scene, according to Philly.com. “It’s disgusting. Our director here wanted the inside of the heart to be identical to a real heart. God forbid I took a bite and the doctor would recognize that it’s an artery.”

According to Hayek, the heart was made out of a blend of pasta, candy, and other “disgusting things.”

“I thought I was going to throw up,” Salma said.

You can check out her stomach-churning scene below.

According to ET Online, Salma Hayek recently shared a video of herself chowing down on a cricket, so you’d think that she wouldn’t have that much of a problem with eating a fake heart. Luckily, her 7-year-old daughter, Valentina, came up with a neat puking prevention trick — she told her mother to start eating the huge heart from the front so she could spit it out in the back.

“She saved my life,” Salma said of her daughter’s ingenuity.

Perhaps Valentina has a future as a movie director.

Salma Hayek’s character is eating the heart of a sea creature because she’s desperate to become pregnant. According to the Guardian, the queen is told that the only way she can bear a child is if she eats “the heart of a sea monster that has been boiled and served by a virgin.”

John C. Reilly’s king character is put in charge of procuring the heart for his wife, and, judging from the movie’s NSFW trailer, he pays for it with his life.

Salma Hayek’s queen is based on a character from “The Enchanted Doe,” one of the 17th-century Neapolitan fairy tales collected by Giambattista Basile. Basile’s Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales, contains some of the earliest versions of famous fairy tales, including Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. His stories were nothing like the Disney versions that so many kids have grown up with — they were rife with rape, horrific deaths, cannibalism, and incest.

According to the Telegraph, Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales explores two more of Basile’s lesser-known fairy tales in addition to the one mentioned above. In “The Flea,” an eccentric king (Toby Jones) raises a giant flea that ends up playing a role in a woman getting married off to an ogre. And in “The Flayed Old Lady,” Vincent Cassel plays a sex-crazed prince who becomes enamored with the singing voice of an old hag.

The Telegraph describes Tale of Tales as “the kind of film you’ve spent the 10 years wishing Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton would make,” and the Guardian also gushed about the film, giving it a five-star review.

“It is gloriously mad, rigorously imagined, visually wonderful: erotic, hilarious and internally consistent. The sort of film, in fact, which is the whole point of Cannes. It immerses you in a complete created world.”

As the Inquisitr previously reported, Salma Hayek has lamented about how difficult it is for actresses over 30 to find work in Hollywood. Perhaps this is why she chose to sign on for a movie directed by an Italian director and filmed in Italy (Tale of Tales is an English-language film, however).

Salma Hayek’s latest project sounds and looks a lot more interesting than many of the movies Hollywood is churning out these days, so the heart-eating actress should tell America’s discriminatory directors to eat their hearts out — she can leave the country and become a queen, after all.

[Image credit: 01 Distribution]