“Maybe kismet does exist”: the role that made Zoe Saldaña’s childhood dream come true
When you’ve achieved a lot in Hollywood and made an awful lot of money doing it, you have the ability to do certain things.
You might want to give millions to charity, or humbly start a foundation named after yourself, or if you’re James Cameron, you can spend billions on a seemingly never-ending series of films about giant blue people on a distant planet starring Zoe Saldaña that nobody admits to liking but that somehow has become the most successful series in history.
It’s called the ‘Avatar phenomenon’ (it’s not, I just made that up), but it’s worth testing it out on your friends and family. Nobody you know, and I can guarantee this, will have 1) gone to see an Avatar film at the cinema since the first one, or 2) will say that they want any more Avatar movies to be made in the future. Two was plenty, three was complete overkill, and yet Cameron goes on and on ploughing unspeakable amounts of cash into not just a fourth film, but a fifth as well, which isn’t even due until 2031, which is so far away that at that point we will all be living in space, probably.
Of course despite the fact nobody wants these movies and nobody goes to see them, they still somehow more than break even; in fact, the third film, last year’s Avatar: Fire and Ash cost an eye-watering $400million to make and yet, get this, brought in $1.49billion at the box office, meaning absolutely nobody is going to say to Cameron, ‘any chance you can just stop at three’ because frankly too much money rides on it. And Saldaña is certainly not going to be one of those people, given they’ve made her the highest-grossing actor in history.
She’s been there right from the start, since 2009’s Avatar, which co-starred Sam Worthington and which, to be fair to Cameron, was at least something quite new, interesting and visually spectacular, even if the actual plot was completely unfathomable and the movie eventually just descended into loads of strange creatures flying around the place firing machine guns indiscriminately.
Saldaña was thrilled to be working under Cameron, who has a history of placing badass female characters front and centre in his movies, first with Linda Hamilton in the peerless 1984 action sci-fi The Terminator, and then again as he stood on Ridley Scott’s shoulders and made Aliens, the showcase for how utterly not to be messed with Sigourney Weaver was, especially when armed with an actual gun-firing exoskeleton she could jump in and clunk around a xenomorph-infested space station.
Saldaña was asked by Rotten Tomatoes whether she felt she was the latest in Cameron’s series of female action heroes and enthusiastically answered, “Oh my god, yes! Every day, and you’re so embarrassed to say it, you know, because obviously it’s going to make him uncomfortable. Maybe kismet does exist: when you want something, when you’re very specific about someone you like, for some reason you set out to look for it; but at the same time, if it’s meant to be with you, it’ll come and look for you.”
That certainly seems to have been the case for Saldaña, who admitted that she’d been a fan of The Terminator since she was just five years old (which is way too young to be watching it, by the way), and even at that stage, the film helped her decide what kind of an actor she hoped to be in the future. She added, “Little did I know that when I was five, I was gonna see a movie that would make me the kind of tough woman that I wanted to be, and make the films that I want to see. And then, 25 years later, to be working with James Cameron, it’s like, ‘What the fuck?’, you know?”
Maybe she can have a quiet word with him and get him to make another brilliant film like The Abyss, or T2: Judgment Day, or True Lies and not yet another Avatar then.
