The role Zoe Saldaña spent a year desperately trying to turn down: “I ran away”
Zoe Saldaña has starred in the three highest-grossing movies of all time, and in 2025, she won her first Academy Award. By anyone’s estimation, she has had an incredibly successful acting career arc. However, that didn’t stop her inner demons from making her feel so insecure about accepting a potentially challenging role that she actively ran from it for a year.
When most people think about Saldaña, they likely think of one of her iconic science-fiction roles. After all, this is the woman who plays Neytiri in James Cameron’s all-conquering Avatar series, Lieutenant Uhura in JJ Abrams’ rebooted Star Trek trilogy, and Guardians of the Galaxy member Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most actors are lucky to star in one truly iconic role in their career, but Saldaña has three.
However, while she has always been grateful for her franchise roles, she has also admitted that they’ve taken up a lot of her career real estate. After all, Avatar, Star Trek, and Marvel account for ten movies in Saldaña’s filmography, with two more Avatars currently in various stages of production/post-production. To put that into context, since she started playing Gamora in 2014, Saldaña has only starred in seven live-action films that weren’t Marvel or Avatar, plus a few cameos and voice roles.
This double-edged sword of franchise success left Saldaña feeling “disheartened” at a certain point, because she had reached a tipping point where she craved the opportunity to challenge herself. “I wanted to see what was out there beyond these amazing franchises,” she told Entertainment Tonight, “that have granted me so many opportunities, but have also taken so much of my time”.
Thankfully, two such opportunities soon presented themselves for her consideration. First, she made the Netflix romantic miniseries From Scratch in 2022, which took her to Florence, Italy, and flexed some acting muscles she didn’t get to use much while painted green as Gamora or covered in motion capture dots as Neytiri.
Around this time, though, she was also contacted by Sicario and Hell or High Water writer Taylor Sheridan, who was putting together his latest TV show for Paramount. The mogul behind the Yellowstone universe wanted Saldaña for the lead in Special Ops: Lioness, a military action drama loosely based on a real-life programme to place female undercover operatives next to high-value CIA targets.
“Taylor called in the middle of the pandemic and presented me this opportunity,” she explained. “So, it almost felt like I had wished it so hard internally, you know, that the universe heard it”. Amazingly, though, instead of leaping at the chance to dig into the project like she had with From Scratch, Saldaña was struck with a bout of impostor syndrome. “I did what every insecure actor does: I ran away,” the Avengers: Endgame star confessed. “I said no. I self-sabotaged for a year”.
Indeed, it was only after she was done with her Italian romp that Saldaña felt she was finally ready to consider playing Joe McNamara, the CIA case officer in control of the Lioness programme, in Sheridan’s fast-paced, ultra-violent, and fiercely topical drama. “I sent him a text, and he immediately responded, and in a very nice way, he was like, ‘I told you, silly. We were waiting on you’.”
At this point, Saldaña decided to take the plunge and sign up for the show, which wound up being a “wonderful time”. She has since played McNamara in two highly rated seasons, with a third seemingly on the horizon, giving her a very different outlet to her big-screen franchise endeavours and a creative way to tackle her demons.
