Around the time Zoe Saldaña turned 40, she had a realization: She’d lost touch with her inner artist — the “little brown girl from Queens” who had delivered a standout supporting turn in 2000’s ballet drama “Center Stage” while dreaming of becoming a leading lady. Those dreams had come true, yet she still doubted herself.
“There was a level of exhaustion that I felt because I was always putting up this front of overconfidence,” Saldaña says. “All of a sudden, I felt compelled to reassess myself and question whether or not what I have been creating and putting out there matches up to that confidence. And no, it didn’t.” So, she began examining the root cause. “Realizing that it was all stemming from insecurity — because I always felt like an imposter — was very overwhelming.”
Saldaña has starred in the three highest-grossing films of all time — 2009’s “Avatar” and its 2022 sequel “The Way of Water,” which hold the No. 1 and 3 spots respectively, with 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame” sandwiched in between. She is also the first actress to have four movies gross more than $2 billion, including 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War.” And her overall box office haul totals more than $14 billion.
Victoria Stevens for Variety
But as much as those franchises (plus three “Star Trek” movies) have been Saldaña’s calling card, they’ve also been a golden cocoon, making her famous but also protecting her from taking the kinds of risky parts that would develop her talent. Now Saldaña is ready to spread her wings and fly, thanks in large part to her latest role in the operatic drama “Emilia Pérez.”
Set against the brutality of Mexico’s cartels, it’s the story of a group of women who want to chart a course away from all the violence, including Saldaña as an idealistic lawyer and Karla Sofía Gascón as the titular Emilia Pérez, a drug lord who starts a new life after undergoing gender-affirming surgery. (It’s also one of the most unlikely musicals ever made.)
Saldaña’s character, Rita, is stuck in a dead-end job until she meets Emilia. Together the two form a nonprofit with the goal of improving the lives that have been destroyed by the drug wars. Rita stood out to Saldaña because she was hungry, and Saldaña could relate to that.
“I’m grateful for the things that I’ve had in my life and the way that my success has happened, but I felt stuck, in the sense that I was taking things for granted too much,” she says, reflecting on a career kicking ass in stunt-filled sci-fi and action films. “I entered this cycle of doing these sequels, and for some reason I became cavalier with them.”
She’d worked hard on those movies, never “phoning it in,” but she lost some of her fire in the churn of one big-budget blockbuster after another. “I wish I could go back and do a better job for Gamora [in the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ and ‘Avengers‘ movies] and Uhura [in ‘Star Trek’]. But I guess I just …” She pauses. “I think I did enough, but I could have done more. That’s just how I am.”
But there was something deeper keeping Saldaña from exploring more earthbound projects. “The challenges that I’ve had, they have to do with my learning abilities,” Saldaña explains. “I have dyslexia and anxiety, which prevented me from really going after roles — a whole lot of roles — that I know I could have done.”
Victoria Stevens for Variety
Case in point: Saldaña passed on the opportunity to star in Taylor Sheridan’s military series “Special Ops: Lioness,” because she was intimidated by the prospect of having to learn a lot of dialogue. When she ultimately took the role, which Sheridan had written with her in mind, she requested her scripts weeks in advance and hired a line reader to break them down with her a couple hours each day on Zoom.
“I would memorize, memorize, memorize, and by the time that scene would come, it was an extension of who I was — like ballet,” she says, recalling when it all clicked. “The moment my brain realized that words are like a plié in a pas de deux, I was just like, ‘Ooh, a grand jeté is like a Taylor Sheridan monologue.’”
She adds, laughing, “The worst thing that Taylor can do is to change a scene last minute or add dialogue. That’s when I’m like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, that’s dyslexia 2.0’ — that will be the next step.”
At this stage of her career, Saldaña hasn’t auditioned in a while — which is a good thing, given that her anxiety often made that process tough. “It didn’t matter if I worked really hard — I would self-sabotage. My head won’t leave my head alone,” she says.
But “Emilia Pérez” was everything she had been yearning for — particularly the chance to work in Spanish, which is her first language (she is Afro-Latino, of Puerto Rican and Dominican heritage), and to dance again. So, she was determined to fight for the role, which meant auditioning for the director, French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, and singing live over Zoom. After a shaky first take, Audiard offered her another chance to get it right. With the initial nerves out of the way, Saldaña found Rita’s voice.
In that instant, Audiard knew that he’d found the one, so much so that he revised the script for Saldaña. “Rita was supposed to be only 25 years old; however, as soon as I had Zoe in front of me, I realized that I’d been mistaken all along,” Audiard says in an email. “I was even more impressed afterwards when I saw her dancing live on set.”
One such scene is the show-stopping number “El Mal.” Saldaña delivers a blazing performance, singing and dancing — even climbing on top of a table — as she snakes through a crowded gala for the one percent of the one-percent and calls out their hypocrisy. “Zoe constantly dazzled me,” Audiard says. “On several occasions, I wondered whether it would work, given the complexity of the project, but it was always beautiful to watch as it unfolded.”
Because of her dance background, Saldaña tends to build her characters from the inside out, trying to get a sense of how they move through the world. She’s become a master of nonverbal communication, using her nimble and agile body to add depth to her characters. It’s a quality she has admired in actors like Robert De Niro and Benicio del Toro — “people who are of very few words, by choice, but their performances are the most profound,” she says.
She took the same approach to playing Rita. “She was this insecure woman that didn’t want to be really seen, even though she was yearning to be,” Saldaña says, miming the character’s staccato motions. “But when the lights go down and Jacques gives you the impression that we’re inside her thoughts, that’s when she unleashes.”
Consider Saldaña unleashed too: “I just have this brand-new little spark. And I feel like ‘Emilia’ really did that for me.”
“Emilia Pérez” debuted to raves at the 77th Cannes Film Festival in May. Then, in a delicious twist, Saldaña and her co-stars, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz and Gascón, were awarded the festival’s best actress prize as an ensemble. Now, she’s been catapulted into the Oscar race.
It’s the kind of critical acclaim Saldaña always wanted. “Whatever the outcome, I want to make sure that it doesn’t take away the fact that ‘Emilia Pérez’ was impactful in my life,” she says. “It gave me a lot, and I gave a lot for it. If I get the recognition, it would be a dream come true, but I’m taking it day by day.”
“Avatar” director James Cameron thinks the awards love is overdue. “I’ve worked with Academy Award-winning actors, and there’s nothing that Zoe’s doing that’s of a caliber less than that,” he says. “But because in my film she’s playing a ‘CG character,’ it kind of doesn’t count in some way, which makes no sense to me whatsoever.”
In the 17 years since they met on “Avatar,” Cameron has only grown more impressed with Saldaña’s range.
“She can go from regal to, in two nanoseconds, utterly feral,” he says. “The woman is ferocious. She is a freaking lioness.” For the forthcoming “Avatar” film, subtitled “Fire and Ash,” Saldaña’s Neytiri is a grieving mother. It’s an arc Cameron knew she was more than prepared to handle. “Her emotional availability is like a fire hose,” he says. “It just comes through so fast and so powerfully.”
Saldaña has signed up for two more “Avatar” sequels, which will keep her employed into her early 50s, plus Season 2 of “Lioness,” which debuts on Oct. 27, and a long-in-development fourth “Star Trek” movie. But her time at Marvel may be over, and she’s content to wrap up her seven-year run with 2023’s “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” and ready to pass the torch to another actor.
“Let it be a brown girl to play Gamora,” Saldaña says, naming her wish for the character moving forward. “Give that opportunity to a woman of color and see what the new Gamora is going to bring to the table. Like I brought Nyota Uhura to the table with Nichelle Nichols’ blessing.”
As for Uhara, Saldaña would like to see her ascend to a leadership position in “Star Trek 4.” “She’s a xenolinguistics master, but I would like her doing something else,” Saldaña says. “I’m curious to see her relationship with Spock (Zachary Quinto) and how that has evolved.”
But she’s only holding half her breath as she waits to read a script. “In the first years when these sequels were becoming a thing in my life, I wouldn’t do anything. I would just live my life and wait,” she says. “Now I’m learning that there’s so many things I want to do. I’m like ‘Hey, what’s out there?’”
In the meantime, Saldaña also made two films with her husband, director Marco Perego Saldaña. Their first collaboration, “The Absence of Eden,” takes on immigration, while their second, the short film “Dovecote,” is a meditation on the cost of freedom set in a Venetian women’s prison. (She produced both under the Cinestar Pictures banner she runs with her sisters, Cisely and Mariel.) Saldaña has ambitions to direct, too, but that professional transition might take more time.
“When you direct — especially the kind of director that I am, and that I’ve witnessed all the directors that I’ve admired be — you live with a movie for years,” she explains. “I just want to make sure that that my kids (identical twins Cy and Bowie, 9; and Zen, 7) are old enough where they don’t even notice that I’m gone.”
It’s become increasingly “intolerable” to be away from her family for work, she says. “I always walk around with a heavy heart every time I’m away from them. But I also have a heavy heart if I walk away from art and feel that I didn’t give my all.”
And Saldaña is happy to keep challenging herself, even when it makes her uncomfortable. After all, there’s great strength in vulnerability.
It took courage, she says, “acknowledging that I’m scared, that I don’t want to stop growing, that I have so much more to learn. And that I want to work with many more filmmakers and do many more roles, different than the ones that I’ve done before.” But it’s all been worth it. “There’s something that comes with maturity — which is wisdom. And wisdom sometimes means just being honest with yourself.”
Charity Spotlight: Baby2Baby
It’s been more than a decade since Zoe Saldaña learned about Baby2Baby, a nonprofit that provides critical items to more than 1 million children living in poverty across the U.S.
“From the beginning, I was deeply moved by Baby2Baby’s mission. “[Co-CEOs] Kelly Sawyer Patricof and Norah Weinstein are so audacious, persistent and determined to provide essential needs that they believe every child is entitled to.”
Founded in 2011, Baby2Baby has distributed more than 450 million essentials — including diapers, formula, clothing and cribs — to children in homeless shelters, domestic violence programs, foster care agencies, hospitals, underserved school districts and disaster areas. Baby2Baby has been proactive in addressing the growing crisis around diapers, as research shows nearly one in two U.S. families can’t afford them. The organization has distributed more than 200 million diapers to families and, in 2021, developed its own diaper manufacturing system to lower costs.
Over the years, Saldaña has grown more involved with Baby2Baby, becoming one of the nonprofit’s ambassadors. The mission is personal, since Saldaña has three sons. “When you’re a parent, teaching your child to be responsible and feel accountable for all the change that happens is paramount for their development,” Saldaña says.
That’s why she brings her sons to Baby2Baby events; it’s about exposing them to an injustice, then showing them they can take action to remedy it. “It keeps their hearts open,” she says. “It makes them aware of the world — that the world needs a whole lot more than we may think it does.”
