Salma Hayek kept quite the royal secret on Meghan Markle‘s behalf, the actress and advocate revealed to CNN, in order to keep Markle’s British Vogue guest-editing spot a secret. Hayek said she was sitting in her car when she got the call from longtime friend and British Vogue editor in chief Edward Enninful asking if it was OK to patch in someone very special and mysterious.
“I was in the car and he said, ‘Listen, I’m going to put somebody on the phone. Are you in the car with people?’ I said ‘Yes.’ He told me ‘you cannot say the name of the person I’m calling.’ Frankly, I thought it was a joke. And we are also very good friends with Naomi Campbell. And I thought, they’re pulling my leg or something, you know?” Hayek explained. “I said, ‘Oh, she’s in London and he’s gonna pass me to her. But then it took a while for the other person to get on the phone. Then she got on the phone and introduced herself.”
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On the phone was Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle. Hayek had never met her.
“She introduced herself and was very kind and loving and easy going,” she said, adding that Markle explained a future “project in support of women” she was working on. Citing her work with women’s charities for 25 years, Hayek said that she expected Markle to inquire about teaming up together for a specific organization. CNN reports that she’s on the board of the Kering Foundation, which combats violence against women, and helped with Chime for Change, a campaign for Gucci to promote women’s rights, and is also an advocate for refugees.
But to her surprise, Markle explained that she was working with British Vogue. “She said, you know, she was the guest editor of British Vogue, and I’m thinking maybe it’s going to be an article on what we’re doing, you know, with Kering and women, and she said no, ‘I’m [doing a cover], I’m not going to be the cover, I’m putting my favorite women on the cover. And you’re definitely one of them.’”
“I was, like, completely shocked,” Hayek said. “I did not see it coming that way. She started talking about how she’s been watching me and why me,” Hayek said.
The phone call led to a top-secret mission that Hayek couldn’t even open up about to her husband, François-Henri Pinault, or 11-year-old daughter, Valentina. Eventually, she flew to London to shoot the top-secret cover of the magazine alongside the other women hand-picked by Markle.
“I couldn’t talk about it and I didn’t,” she said. “I felt very honored when we did this photo shoot. No one else knew what it was for. Only me and the photographer, Peter Lindbergh, knew. And all the girls were getting their picture taken for the cover and they didn’t know that Meghan was how they got there.”
After the details about Markle’s guest editing issue were released earlier this week, Hayek said she got a call from Markle and Enninful congratulating her on keeping the big secret.
Markle’s Force for Change issue, which also features actors and activists Laverne Cox, Yara Shahidi, Gemma Chan and Jane Fonda, is set to hit newsstands on Friday.
Photo credit: Pascal Le Segretain / Staff / Getty
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