Baftas 2025: Zoe Saldaña wins ‘Best Supporting Actress’
Zoe Saldaña has won the Bafta for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for her role in Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez.
Set in Mexico, the film follows a ruthless cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) who decides to come out as a trans woman and reinvent her life outside of the drug trade. Saldaña plays Rita Mora Castro, the lawyer who plays a pivotal role in helping her disappear and start a new life.
Emilia Pérez won big when it was released at Cannes last year, earning the Jury Prize and ‘Best Ensemble’ for its female leads. It earned 11 Bafta nominations and 13 Oscar nominations. However, it has been engulfed in controversy, most notably when Gascón’s Tweets from between 2019 and 2022 that espoused racist and Islamophobic rhetoric.
In her acceptance speech, Saldaña said, “I was told not to cry by my children, so I’ll try. This is so validating and a true honour, because the very few times that I went for a part with a British accent or dialect coach, I was like, ‘This is not going to happen to you.’ Even though I have a lot of British friends, I find myself repeating all their phrases, and I know that I’m a pain in the arse.”
She continued, “Bafta thank you, this was a creative challenge of a lifetime. How do you begin to even approach a film that not just defies categorisation, and you start by taking the leap with Jacques Audiard. I want to thank my wonderful cast… Films are supposed to change hearts and challenge minds and i hope i did something like this. voices need to be heard, just not my English accent.”
There has been extensive speculation over how greatly the controversy would impact the film’s awards prospects, and it’s notable that the actor mentioned Gascón by name in the speech, though Audiard did not when accepting the award for ‘Best Foreign Language Film.’
Saldaña won the Golden Globe for her performance before the Tweets came to light and was heavily favoured to win the Bafta and is still a frontrunner for the Oscar. Her win this evening shores up her chances, even as the scandal continues.
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