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Zoe Saldaña has starred in blockbuster franchises “Star Trek,” “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avatar,” has won an Oscar for “Emilia Perez” and holds the crown as the actor whose films have earned the most money ever.
So what comes next?
“I have a feeling that I can only watch other people’s direction for so long until I kind of say: ‘Give me that camera!’” Saldaña told an audience at Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. “Because women, we all think that we’re right because we are half the time. So I would like to prove myself.”
Having received a Special Honorary Pardo from festival director Giona Nazzaro, Saldaña engaged in a lively conversation which ranged from her upbringing in New York and Dominican Republic to her current and future acting roles in the third season of Taylor Sheridan’s “Lioness” and the upcoming fourth entry in the “Avatar” franchise.
Of her childhood, she described the cultural clash of moving from the U.S. to the DR: “It was quite difficult for us to be torn from a New York kind of culture where you get to meet the world in your block. That’s rich to grow up in a culture like that. And then I went to a small island where it’s very homogenous and it’s one religion, one form of being, and though the growing pains were big, so was the growth.”
Saldaña initially trained as a ballet dancer, but was undone by having the “wrong-shaped feet”: “You have to have the right bridge. And only Russian women are born with this blessing. That’s what you’re told your whole life.” However, her training taught her discipline and her experience as an outsider gave her a particular empathy for the roles she was later to play in science fiction films. “I feel like I have more than enough experience of feeling isolated and othered. And so maybe that’s why when I look at a character like a woman like Neyteri or a woman like Gamora, I feel like I can put so much more into them.”
Having first broken through to audiences on “Law and Order,” she credits her manager Rick Yorn with a recent return to television in the miniseries “Rosemary’s Baby” and Taylor Sheridan’s “Lioness,” which has just premiered its third season: “Rick brought over ‘Lioness’ and compelled me to talk to Taylor Sheridan,” she said. “Good storytelling can live anywhere. Can live also in a small-budget film or large-scale film. Can be on Netflix, Paramount+ or can also be on the West End, off-off-off-off Broadway side of it. It can live anywhere.”
Her CV includes the biggest names in the industry such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg and Gore Verbinski. What was the common trait among them?
“They have looked me in the eyes, and I really felt they saw an artist, and they didn’t just see all these hyphenated things that I also am,” she said. “They saw me as an artist that is equal to a man, to another woman, to a white person, to a Black person, to a disabled person, they just saw me, and they saw what I was able to bring the character that they had conceived to life. To also accentuate a complement to all of these people, I do believe that they all possess a level of inclusivity that they unconsciously live by, based on their core values, and to know that I share core values with someone like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron is amazing for me, because it means that I’m striving for the right things.”
Other people don’t always live up to this standard: “One thing that’s incredibly limiting, and frustrating, is when I’m the only person of color or the only woman on stage, and that happens quite a lot for women and for people of color. And I wait for my turn to be asked a question about my craft, and I’m asked the political question: ‘What do you think we need to do to make films more inclusive?’ I’m sorry, you don’t ask the only person that comes from the marginalized community. You ask the other 80 of them that are part of the gatekeepers, and you ask them that they know the answer because I think that we’re making people of color work double to be in a room.”
Of James Cameron, with whom she has made three “Avatars” and is anticipating working on a fourth, she said: “This man’s storytelling spoke to me when I was 7 years old. I knew that when he wrote and conceived ‘The Terminator,’ that he was tapping into something incredibly human and foreseeable, and I was &. The purpose that he gave a woman like Sarah Connor, at my tender age of 7, spoke volumes to me, and I wanted to be her.”
A lesser known director she worked with was her husband Marco Perego, with whom she made the 2023 film “Absence of Eden,” a cross-border tale of human trafficking, immigration and ICE which has only increased in relevance. “Marco had the idea when our governments were changing in 2016,” she said. “We found ourselves — me as a first-generation American, and my husband as an immigrant who had just gained his citizenship in the U.S… We were welcoming a family while witnessing families being torn apart due to immigration laws that were shifting, and what really affected us was the inhumane way upon which people were treated.”
She also teased a project she hopes to develop, a family drama based in the post-war era in San Francisco following a traumatized veteran and his wife, who suspects her husband is gay. “I’ve never seen a film with that theme told through the lens of a family of color,” she said. “So, if no one else is doing it, then one day I would love to be the director to tell a story like that. And it can very well be a Chinese American family. It can be a Latino American family, but it has to be a family of color, something that we have never seen before. A ‘Far from Heaven,’ but with a family of color that we’ve never seen before. I think it’s important. I think these communities need that. I think queer communities of color need that.”
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity and length.
