The movie Zoe Saldaña said was “very elitist”
Any actor at the beginning of their career faces an uphill struggle to make a sustained mark on the industry, but Zoe Saldaña has overcome her dissatisfaction with one of her earliest roles to set a number of impressive records.
Thanks to Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers: Infinity War, and its own sequel, Endgame, Saldaña became the first and so far only actor to appear in four separate films that each earned over $2 billion at the global box office.
Her contributions to a myriad of other hits, including the Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek trilogies, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Thor: Love and Thunder, and Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal have also seen her emerge as the highest-grossing female actor in the history of cinema, with her filmography reaching a cumulative haul north of $15.5 billion.
That’s an incredible accomplishment and vindication of how she was treated on her first major Hollywood blockbuster set. In the Pirates of the Caribbean saga’s opener, Saldaña appears as Anamaria, who engages in a brief spat with Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow when he’s assembling his motley crew.
It should have opened the doors to not just more visibility in the industry but the possibility of reprising the role in further sequels. However, as she told The Hollywood Reporter, “Those weren’t the right people for me”. Her issue wasn’t with the cast but what she called “the political stuff that went on behind closed doors”.
“It was a lot of above-the-line versus below-the-line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs,” she continued, “It was very elitist. I almost quit the business. I was 23 years old, and I was like, ‘Fuck this!’ I am never putting myself in this situation again”. Saldaña couldn’t sanction “people disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I’m not important”, which ended up landing her an apology years later.
The MCU stalwart would confirm that she was “able to meet with Jerry Bruckheimer, who apologised that I had that experience because he really wants everyone to have a good experience on his projects”. The way she was treated may have sworn her off returning for any of the subsequent four Pirates of the Caribbean films, but based on what she’s accomplished since, there shouldn’t be any regrets on her part.
Having had such a torrid time on her first expensively assembled studio production, Saldaña came close to walking away from acting entirely. Instead, she regrouped and is now able to call herself the single highest-grossing female performer Hollywood has ever seen, so it would be an understatement to say things worked out very well for her in the long run.
