“I would rather shoot myself in the foot”: The one thing Zoe Saldaña will never do for a role
Actors will go through an awful lot to convincingly portray a character.
It could be hours on end sitting in a make-up chair while prosthetics are applied, or attaching themselves to the outside of a plane like Tom Cruise does or becoming a real-life New York cabbie like Robert De Niro for Taxi Driver, and while Zoe Saldaña has also done plenty of things in the name of movies, she draws the line at not being allowed burgers.
Saldaña has been at the acting thing for a long, long time now, with about as much as success as it’s possible to have given she is, depending on which month you check, either the highest grossing actor in cinema history, or the second highest grossing, a fact which changes any time Scarlett Johansson releases another film and knocks her off the top spot.
In getting to that position, Saldaña has certainly served her time in the make-up chair: her role in the first Guardians of the Galaxy films as Thanos’ adopted daughter Gamora required some five hours of prosthetics and face painting to be administered, although at least the two follow-up films only required four hours. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact she won’t be returning to the Marvel world for this year’s billion-dollar mash-up, Avengers: Doomsday.
Her co-star in the Guardians movies, Star Lord himself, Chris Pratt, famously had something of a transformation himself in order to go from pudgy office musician Andy in Parks and Recreation to a svelte, Walkman-toting interplanetary leading man, dropping 60 pounds (about three stone in English money) and earning himself heartthrob status in the process, but that’s where Saldaña draws the line.
She told Digital Spy at the time, “I don’t like to fuck with my body like that. I think it’s marvellous when actors do, but I know I don’t have it in me to not eat, or to overeat. I would rather shoot myself in the foot. This is not invalidating what Chris has done, he had to go through the transformation, and it was a spiritual thing as well for him, and he looks fantastic.”
Probably the most famous weight-loss method acting in history came from Christian Bale for the 2004 psychological mystery The Machinist, for which the British actor lost 65 pounds over a four-month period. In order to play the troubled factory worker Reznik, Bale used a calorie-sparse diet that saw him consume nothing but a black coffee, one apple and a tin of tuna per day.
Saldaña added, “I really admire actors like Bale and Jared Leto who go up and down, but they’re gifted, and once they’re done with that movie, they go back and look like who they are. I don’t think that would happen to me. I love Shake Shack too much, as well!” She does have a point, to be fair, for Shake Shack is delicious, and they do crinkle cut chips, which are the best chips; don’t come at me.
Meanwhile, the actor not overthinking her meals will be busy over the next couple of years working on her Taylor Sheridan action series Special Ops: Lioness as well as making another two Avatar movies, the giant blue people franchise which is now basically a very expensive James Cameron vanity project that demands people sigh and trudge off to the cinema every few years to watch another instalment nobody asked for.
