The two iconic characters that shaped Zoe Saldaña’s career: “They were my true north”
When you ask people to name the highest-grossing actor of all time, it’s quite strange how unconscious bias still plays a big part in the answers, as most people will still assume it must be a man.
However, if you tell them it’s actually a woman, they’ll struggle to think of too many possibilities, where, in fact, the top two spots are held by women, Scarlett Johansson and Zoe Saldaña.
While many might get to Johansson eventually, thanks to her Marvel movies and the Jurassic Park series, not many would name Saldaña, despite the fact that she has also appeared in not just Marvel movies, but Avatar, Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean too. That’s aside from massive TV shows like her recent thriller Special Ops: Lioness and voice-overs for Pixar films like Elio, while on the way to picking up an Oscar for her role in the musical Emilia Pérez.
So it’s fair to say she’s doing alright, and then some, bringing in almost $15 billion at the box office and likely to move past Johansson once the gate receipts for James Cameron’s latest Avatar: Fire and Ash are totted up at the end of this month. It’s understandable then to ask why she isn’t quite as household a name as her fellow lead actors, and certainly race will have played a part in that, despite Saldaña being born and raised in New Jersey.
She also has Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage and believes that her race, in addition to people looking down on superhero movies, has contributed to perhaps not getting the exposure and the acclaim that undoubtedly should have come her way over a more than 20-year career.
But she doesn’t feel like she didn’t see herself represented when she was growing up watching films and dreaming of becoming an actor, claiming to Net-a-Porter, “I did! As a child, when I saw Sigourney Weaver play Ellen Ripley [in Alien] or Linda Hamilton play Sarah Connor [in Terminator], they were my true north, because I loved action, I loved science fiction, and I loved the roles that they played. They were inspiring to me; I wanted that. It wasn’t until I started in my own career that I was reminded that I wasn’t ‘like’ them.”
Visual discrepancies aside, it’s notable that, of course, both the films Saldaña mentioned were James Cameron movies, and she went on to be the lead in his most treasured creation, Avatar, signing onto the first in the series, released in 2009, when she was just 28, and by the time the fifth and final instalment comes out in 2031, she will be 54, marking a long and fruitful collaboration through a single role.
Of this, she said recently, “It’s a gift to be able to revisit a character that has given me so much. To revisit a place that has been so magical. Not just for me, but for so many people in the world”.
Aside from filming Avatar four and five, Saldaña will be reprising her role as CIA case officer Joe McNamara in Taylor Sheridan’s hit Special Ops: Lioness, which was renewed for a third season last year and is currently in production. She also picked up a Critics’ Choice award for her performance in the show, which is based on a true-life unit of undercover female operatives and also features Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman as prominent fixtures.
