Salma Hayek Pinault redefined Hollywood. Now she’s redefining philanthropy.

IN THE COURSE of one conversation, Salma Hayek Pinault mourns the death of her pet rescue owl, reveals that she never signed a prenup in her marriage to French billionaire François-Henri Pinault and bemoans the obnoxiousness of certain wealthy people who assume they’re interesting just because they’re rich.

But ask about her typical day, and she has no words.

“Nothing in my life is typical,” she says, her smoky voice filling the low-ceilinged room in a London pub, where she shows up on an overcast Monday afternoon awash in head-to-toe Gucci and perfume drawn from ingredients that include Mexican tuberose and queen of the night, an opulent cactus with flowers that each bloom just once a year in the dark.

The Mexican-born actress, 58, famous for her curves and sultry accent, took the objectification of Salma Hayek and bent it to her will: She used her Hollywood clout to create roles for Latina women that defy ethnic stereotypes and channeled her influence into a decadeslong fight against domestic violence. She defied the odds to become one of a tiny handful of Latina leading ladies in the 1990s, and then, while working to preserve that status, developed parallel careers as a producer and a philanthropist.

“I’m talking with my mouth full,” she says after dipping some crust from a sourdough boule into melted rosemary and garlic Camembert, on-brand for a person who professes no strict fitness regimen. “Emotional intelligence,” she’s saying of the forces that drive her. “Human, real connection.”

She’s got a high-drama aura but she’s also pragmatic, a trait visible in her charity work. “I’m passionate,” she says, “but I’m a strategist.” In just three years, Hayek Pinault has turned the Kering Foundation’s annual fundraising dinner in New York, Caring for Women, into a mini Met Gala. The event sponsored by her husband’s luxury goods company Kering sprang fully formed onto the fashion circuit—it wasn’t a slow-building phenomenon like the behemoth Met Gala—and in many ways it’s an expression of Hayek Pinault herself. Every detail runs through her for a gathering that, while raising roughly $3 million, brings attention to the fight against gender-based violence.

As a charity hostess, who on red carpets often appears bejeweled like a modern Elizabeth Taylor, she has curated her own group of tastemakers with guests including Jessica Chastain, Leonardo DiCaprio and Viola Davis.

“She gets you on board,” says friend Eva Longoria, “and she doesn’t take no foran answer.”

IT’S TEMPTING to think of Hayek Pinault’s story as a rags-to-riches tale: The young actress from a small town in southern Mexico gets cast in the leading role on a telenovela and leapfrogs to stardom. In fact, she came from a wealthy family in the coastal city of Coatzacoalcos. Her father was an oil executive of Lebanese descent, her mother an opera singer with Spanish roots, and she grew up with four live-in maids. She saw Europe as a 2-year-old and traveled by private jet. She loved her pet bobcat.

After she moved to L.A. in her mid-20s, her father lost his fortune, Hayek Pinault says. She was a struggling actress with the stress of supporting herself and her family back in Mexico. “That’s when I became the best version of myself,” she says.

In Hollywood, studios first saw her accent as a liability. But director Robert Rodriguez cast her in the 1995 drug-crime western Desperado, followed a year later by his cult hit From Dusk Till Dawn, where she dances with a huge yellow python slung around her shoulders and sticks her toes in Quentin Tarantino’s mouth. Her breakthrough came in 1997 with Fools Rush In, a shotgun-marriage rom-com co-starring Matthew Perry.

With her success came Hollywood money. But her finances leapt into another dimension with her 2009 marriage to Pinault, the chief executive of Kering, a corporate giant that owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and other major luxury brands. The reality of marrying into extreme wealth surprised her.

“To me, the excitement about having a lot of money was that I didn’t have to think about money, and it turned out all people wanted to talk to me about was money,” she says of her life after joining the Pinault family. “Strangers coming to me that aren’t even friends, but they think we should be friends because they’re rich, too.”

She and Pinault keep their finances separate, she says, and there’s no prenuptial agreement dividing assets. The more she thinks about it lately, she says, the more she’d like to increase her own net worth.

“I support a lot of the aspects of my life and myself,” she says. “I have the pressure to make a certain amount of money, and I like it. And now, I decided, I want to make more.”

With their 17-year-old daughter, Valentina, on the cusp of adulthood, Hayek Pinault is pursuing business ideas, which she isn’t ready to reveal. Pinault likes this ambition, she says. “I think he finds it kind of sexy.”

ONE ATTRIBUTE that’s made Hayek Pinault famous is her body. Much has been made of her breasts: Talk-show hosts ask her questions about them, her movie characters comment on them, her red-carpet fashions flaunt them. During our interview, when I say I want to ask her a trivia question, she assumes I’m after her bra size.

No, I tell her in a total left turn, I want to learn about the time on the Frida movie set when her monkey co-star bit her, specifically where it bit her. Coincidentally, I’d just gotten a video of a monkey bite in a group chat so I thought I’d show Hayek Pinault a screenshot. It was a picture of a raised pink welt on pale skin—actually a bite on a man’s back—but Hayek Pinault assumed it was an R-rated close-up of a topless woman.

“It is a thing about the boobs,” she scolds when she sees the photo. I explain she’s looking at a monkey bite on a man’s back. “Oh. This isn’t a monkey bite in the boobs?” she asks. No, I tell her, but is she saying that’s where the monkey bit her? No, she replies. This is turning into a who’s-on-first of monkey bites and lady parts. “Can I tell you something?” she says, clutching her breasts with both hands, still horrified by the photo. “My nipples began to hurt when I saw that.”

It turns out, the Frida monkey bit her on the right hand between her thumb and forefinger, and she needed rabies shots. I asked if those were painful and she said, “Yes, yes. Stop it.” She and the monkey, whose name was Tyson, were alone in her trailer, and he started throwing all her CDs at the walls and breaking them. They got into a tug-of-war over a disc, and he bit her. “They should have told me the monkey has been possessed by the devil,” she says.

Frida was her passion project, a major moment for her now 25-year-old production company, Ventanarosa—Spanish for “pink window”—and a big learning opportunity for her. It had been a fight for her to control the material. In one meeting, while trying to wrest back the project from a studio she’d decided against, she had her agent’s attorney friend come as a prop to intimidate executives. “You sit there, nod your head, look mean,” she told him.

The strategy worked. The project was ultimately made at Miramax, the studio co-founded by Harvey Weinstein. Later, she would write a searing op-ed about being sexually harassed by Weinstein.

Hayek Pinault described in the piece having to film a “senseless” full-frontal nude love scene with another woman to placate Weinstein so he wouldn’t block the completion of Frida. Hayek Pinault, distraught over Weinstein’s tactics, vomited for the length of the shoot.

In a statement, Weinstein’s spokesman says “he apologizes to Ms. Hayek for ever making her feel sad or uncomfortable.” He says that Weinstein has “a different memory of those times but isn’t looking to talk about them.”

The roughly $12 million film went on to gross $56 million worldwide and made Hayek Pinault one of the first Latinas ever to be nominated for a best actress Oscar.

With Ugly Betty, an American version of a popular Colombian telenovela, Hayek Pinault initially met resistance from ABC, she says. The actress personally presold international rights and advertising to prove the show’s worth. The series, which supercharged the career of actress America Ferrera, was considered a risk partly because it featured a Latina lead who was not Hollywood’s idea of universal beauty. Hayek Pinault pushed back when some executives wanted to give Betty a makeover. “It got really heated,” she says. Ferrera went on to win the Emmy for best actress in a comedy in 2007.

Most of Ventanarosa’s film and TV works are in Spanish and do not feature Hayek Pinault. Recent titles include the 2019 TV series Monarca, a Succession-style drama on Netflix about a family’s tequila empire, and the Spanish-language HBO series Like Water for Chocolate, premiering this fall. Separately, she continues her own work as an actress, recently premiering the Angelina Jolie–directed wartime film Without Blood at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Hayek Pinault’s longtime producing partner, José “Pepe” Tamez, says the two have been looking at shows like Squid Game, the blockbuster Korean series, to get Latinos in front of a worldwide audience in a similar way. The company had focused on the U.S. and Latin American markets for years, but now they’re thinking more globally. That’s where the opportunity is, Tamez says.

In pitch meetings, Hayek Pinault’s ability to read her audience has been a secret weapon. “Maybe this has to do with the fact that she’s an actress,” Tamez says. “She knows how to listen.”

HAYEK PINAULT’S WORK as a producer did not inform her philanthropy, she says: Her philanthropy made her a better producer.

Her interest in volunteering began in childhood, and her efforts fighting violence against women stretch back to her early days in 2004 working with the Avon Foundation. On a 2009 Unicef trip to Sierra Leone, she famously breast-fed another woman’s baby, a newborn the same age as her own daughter, to combat a regional stigma around breast-feeding. The moment was captured on camera for ABC’s Nightline.

Pinault was keenly interested in her philanthropy. Once when the two were dating and she was volunteering in South America, he asked on the phone about her day. “I said, ‘Oh, it was great. We were with the prostitutes all morning in the red-light district,’ ” she recalls. She talked for an hour, then asked about his day. “He said, ‘I’m embarrassed to tell you what was my day.’ ”

In 2008, a year before they married, the couple began working together to build the Kering Foundation, which Pinault had created to focus on women’s causes.

Over time, Hayek Pinault realized she could broaden her reach even further. In 2013, she and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter founded Gucci Chime for Change, a global campaign by the Kering brand to promote gender equality.

For her signature event, the Caring for Women dinner and charity auction in New York, Hayek Pinault keeps the scope small. The evening’s 200 guests can see each other at 20 tables around a cozy room. For an event that kicks out press, it gets a ton. This year and last, Lauren Sánchez, who is engaged to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, got in a tabloid-perfect bidding war with Kim Kardashian over a Balenciaga couture lot.

Last year, Hayek Pinault adorned the space with plants and played bird sound effects. She personally wrote fellow celebrities to make sure they’d come. Before they arrived, she lit copal, a rock incense used in Mexican rituals, and waved it around for spiritual cleansing.

“My spirit,” she says, “wants to micromanage.”

ON THIS DAY at the pub, Hayek Pinault is mourning the death of Kering, a rescue owl who became famous on her Instagram. A fox got into the aviary on the grounds of their London estate and ate Kering not long ago. The owl slept in her bedroom many nights, though not that evening. “We had our own way of communicating,” Hayek Pinault says. “She would hold my hand and play and try to pull me.” Kering was a pet but also a wild animal. “I never took that owl in if she didn’t want to come in,” she says. The actress knows her owl would have been eaten by a predator long ago if she’d lived in nature. “She had a good life,” she says.

Over the past decade, Hayek Pinault has dealt with losses like this and life’s other challenges by practicing meditation.

A session might take three hours. She knows a meditation DJ who plays music while she lets go in her mindfulness space, which is the smallest room in her house. Sometimes she’s dancing. She’s usually blindfolded, which makes standing on her head tricky. The DJ later debriefs her because she loses herself so completely that she can’t always recall what’s just happened. She finds herself accomplishing physical feats she could never achieve otherwise. She is sparing on details. “I do strange things,” she says.

In the meditation sessions, nothing hurts, she feels elastic in body and spirit. “I’m ready to go in a room wanting nothing and not knowing what to do or what you’re supposed to do—surrendering and understanding your instincts,” she says. “It’s very advanced.”

Like much in Hayek Pinault’s world, the practice is unconventional. “It’s completely the opposite of no pain, no gain,” she says. “It’s completely the opposite of what everyone does.”

Hair, Nao Kawakami; makeup, Wendy Rowe; manicure, Kate Williamson; set design, Max Bellhouse and Tilly Power; production, Bellhouse.

Write to Ellen Gamerman at ellen.gamerman@wsj.com