The actress is known for big franchises. Emilia Pérez is a dramatic shift: “I was doing it for me, and for a long time, I stopped doing things for me.”
When Zoe Saldaña first moved to California, she made a pilgrimage to the Hollywood sign, expecting some awe-inspiring, mystical totem. What she found, to her dismay, was just a sign. No more, no less.
“I was trying to touch Hollywood, and I couldn’t – it’s like a ghost,” she said. “But every day you wake up with that anxiety that you’re going to go touch it, and it’s not there.”
If Hollywood could be grabbed hold of, there are few actors you’d expect to have a better grip on it than Saldaña. She has starred in the three highest-grossing movies of all time: Avatar and the sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, in which she played the fierce alien Neytiri, and Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel team-up that featured her Guardians of the Galaxy character Gamora. If those weren’t enough, she’s also got three Star Trek films under her belt, too. (Outer space may be vast, but Saldaña knows it like it’s her backyard.)
In this modern era of franchise moviemaking, the 46-year-old actress has earned plenty of capital, but one thing she didn’t have until now is a starring vehicle like Emilia Pérez, which scored her her first Golden Globe award for best supporting actress (the film, one of the big winners on the night, took home another three awards, including best film – musical or comedy and best non-English language film).
Then again, Emilia Pérez would be an outlier in any actor’s filmography simply because there are no other movies like it: directed by Jacques Audiard, it’s a gritty crime drama that also happens to be a musical.
Saldaña stars in the Netflix film as Rita, a worn-down Mexico City lawyer who becomes the personal fixer for the former drug lord Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón). A bargain is struck: if Rita can work in secret to help Emilia undergo gender-confirmation surgery, she’ll be financially compensated beyond her wildest dreams. But even as Rita gains entry to the highest echelons of society, she still carries a resentment that comes to a head with El Mal, a scorching song-and-dance number in which she excoriates the hypocritical rich at a charity gala.
That sequence is more than just the film’s highlight: it’s a three-minute clip reel that puts everything Saldaña is capable of on display, including her athletic gift for transmuting her characters’ moods into motion. The performance is so potent that she is almost certain to score her first Oscar nomination; in fact, many consider her to be the current supporting actress front-runner.
This is a significant swerve for Saldaña, who has often wondered, despite her success, if she is truly seen and appreciated for what she can do. The closest she has ever come to earning an Oscar nomination was for the first Avatar, but her motion-capture work in a sci-fi adventure film never found purchase with a voting membership more attuned to traditional prestige films.
Although Emilia Pérez is far from traditional, it does at least present Saldaña as something closer to who she really is, without the trappings of special effects and alien makeup. Receiving awards attention for that performance, which is primarily delivered in her native Spanish, has been heady.
“I keep reminding myself that no matter what happens, everything about Emilia Pérez was special,” she said. “I was doing it for me, and for a long time, I stopped doing things for me.”
In November, I met Saldaña for lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she uncorked a bottle of Brunello – “A good bottle of red just gives way to conversation,” she said – and spoke with candour about her life and career. Raised in New York and the Dominican Republic, Saldaña hustled to make her mark as an actress, breaking through in smaller films like Center Stage and Crossroads before ascending to the female lead of giant sci-fi spectaculars. “I’m so grateful, but I had to sacrifice so many things,” she said.
Despite her success, Saldaña can be awfully hard on herself. Because she is dyslexic and English is not her first language, she has always feared learning lines. Other actresses might salivate when handed a two-page monologue, but Saldaña panics. When Yellowstone showrunner Taylor Sheridan pursued Saldaña to star in his series Lioness, she turned it down until she summoned the courage to ask for extra time to commit his wordy teleplays to memory. Why was she reluctant to simply ask for what she needed?
“I just didn’t think I was good,” she said, shrugging. “I always felt overlooked, but overlooked in the sense of, ‘Well, if I’m overlooked, I deserve it.’”
Now that she has hit her mid-40s, Saldaña has been taking a clear look at the highs, lows and compromises that have propelled her to this point. For as bruising as her industry can be, she knows that sometimes she has been the one holding herself back. She hopes after Emilia Pérez, that will finally change.
“I am my best ally and my worst enemy,” she told me. “I’m a Gemini, so there’s two in there, I guess.”
Peak insecurity
For the last decade, as Saldaña juggled obligations to Avatar, Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy, she feared that she might have cut herself off from working on other kinds of films. Still, the combined might of all those sci-fi franchises gave her something awfully rare in Hollywood: job security.
“At least I knew I had these things coming up that were going to keep me always working,” she said. “The idea was, ‘Oh, I just don’t want people to forget about me.’”
So she committed, filming sequel after sequel. After five years, though, something began to wear her down. It wasn’t burnout. It wasn’t even the fear of typecasting. It was the feeling that she had peaked.
“When you are a part of projects that are so big and they become so successful, yes, you reap the benefits of it and you are grateful,” she said. “But there is a part of me as an artist that just stopped growing and accepting challenges.”
In 2022, just after she finished shooting the third Guardians of the Galaxy film, Audiard asked to meet with her on a video call to discuss playing Rita in Emilia Pérez. She had long been a fan of the French director, who was best known for intense character dramas like A Prophet and Rust and Bone. Still, she was certain she had no shot at winning the role.
After all, why would Audiard cast her? Rita was scripted as a Mexican woman in her 20s and would require extensive singing – on paper, she was all wrong for it. In the past, Saldaña had sabotaged herself during important auditions because she was too anxious that she would lose the part, and she could feel that same fear creeping in.
She wanted to back out of the meeting. Her husband, filmmaker Marco Perego-Saldaña, urged her not to. “Don’t you want to work with Jacques Audiard?” he asked.
“It would be a dream,” she said.
“Then dream,” he told her.
In the end, Saldaña went through with the meeting and even though a panic attack began to grip her during the video call – the voice in her head kept insisting, “They don’t like me” – one question led to another, each story led to another anecdote, and before she knew it, an hour and a half had gone by. Somehow, she had even screwed up the courage to sing.
At the end of the meeting, when Saldaña closed the laptop, she thought to herself, “That went great.” And she’s not the sort of person who lets herself think that so easily.
“Those are the moments where I feel like the universe, the higher power, is talking directly to me and saying, ‘See, I told you,’” she said. “And then all hell broke loose.”
Audiard was willing to rewrite the role to suit Saldaña, but he wanted to shoot the film in September 2022, when she was supposed to begin filming the first season of Lioness. That obligation, plus an extensive global press tour for Avatar: The Way of Water, meant she couldn’t take on a major new project until deep into 2023.
Saldaña figured this was the end of her dream: “I thought, ‘It’s going to go away, but at least I got this far. He knows who I am and one day, if I’m ever in Paris, I’ll ask him for a coffee and he’ll say no, and it’s OK.’”
Instead, Audiard decided to wait for her, pushing the production a full year. “Even now, I have a hard time understanding that,” she said. All she knew was that somehow, she had convinced Audiard to place his faith in her. And if he believed in her, she had better start believing in herself.
Once she made her way to Paris and dove deeply into dance practice, acting rehearsals and vocal training, the thing that surprised her most was how much Audiard continued to seek her perspective on Rita, encouraging her to pull from her own life and experiences to play a woman who often feels overlooked and undervalued. She likened the collaborative experience to working with James Cameron on her biggest franchise.
“It felt like an experiment where we were finding things as we went, and that’s how the first Avatar was shot,” she said. “Ever since then, I’ve been searching for that high again of being with a seasoned, prolific director and having the director look at you going, ‘I don’t know, what do you think?’”
When Emilia Pérez premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it took time for Saldaña to wrap her head around all of the acclaim. Her few days in the south of France felt like an out-of-body experience and it was difficult to snap in and realise that much of the applause was meant for her.
Although she couldn’t attend the festival’s awards ceremony in person, as she had already flown back to Texas to shoot Lioness, she was watching the online livestream with her family when it was announced that the best actress prize would be shared by Saldaña and her co-stars Gascon, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz. That was a prospect she hadn’t dared to imagine, and it made her burst into tears: “I didn’t say words, I just made sounds.”
Now, as her family moves to a new house, Saldaña has been pondering where to put her Cannes trophy (she now has a second to consider – this interview took place before Saldaña’s Golden Globes win). She initially felt bashful about displaying it at all until her husband insisted that she had worked too long and hard to continue shrugging off her accomplishments.
“It took me this long to admit that yes, I do want people’s approval,” she said. “An artist doesn’t just make art to hide it in their closet for themselves. You make art to share in these accolades and even though you say you don’t want them, come on, just throw me a compliment every now and then. It’s that thing of me always asking the universe, do I matter? Does what I’m doing matter?”
‘I was running with scissors for so long’
Even the most accomplished star can be wracked with doubts in a place like Hollywood, where success can feel like a mirage and a 45-foot sign only has as much power as you’re willing to lend it. But Saldaña’s anxieties were shaped long before she set foot on a soundstage.
“I’ve always been competitive with myself and I never, ever, ever again want to feel irrelevant,” she said. “I was running with scissors for so long, since I was 9.”
It was at that age that her father died in a car crash, and Saldaña and her sisters, who had grown up in Queens, were sent to the Dominican Republic for several years to be raised by his family. “Grief knocked on our door very early in our lives and it cast a big shadow,” she said.
Saldaña never found her footing in her new home. All the money her father had left them was put toward his daughters’ private education, but she was ostracised by wealthy classmates who bullied her for being too poor, too gawky and too dark-skinned. Although her sisters tried to protect her, they could only do so much, and Saldaña put all of her frustrated energy into ballet classes, determined to master something that couldn’t be denied.
At 13, she was on a phone call with several other girls when the topic arose: what are you going to be when you grow up? One girl said she wanted to be an architect, while another said she hoped to be an engineer. And then they asked Saldaña, which came as a surprise: she was used to being overlooked in conversation.
She told them she was going to be an actress. The other girls were disbelieving: An actress? Who’d ever want to watch someone like you do something like that?
“That one phone call was my world,” Saldaña said. “When I hung up, I was like, ‘I’m going to be the prettiest, the thinnest, the brightest, most agile bitch in town,’ and it came at all costs. It didn’t matter if I had to skip that meal and dance those extra six hours and rehearse one last time: I was going to be relevant.”
Drive can come from anywhere, and the ambition to succeed can be drawn from sources that most artists wouldn’t like to admit to. But by her early 30s, when Saldaña had reached a level of box-office success that plenty of actors would envy, she finally became cognisant that her relentless drive had taken a toll.
“You go, ‘I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m sad and I’m lonely,’” she said. “‘I don’t want to be the only girl cast. I want to eat a burger, I want to sleep, and I want to ask for help if I’m feeling sad.’”
That’s when the quest of actually trying to enjoy her life began. In 2013, she met Perego-Saldaña while on a flight to New York; they married three months later and now have three sons.
“I didn’t want to dedicate my entire time and my youth and my happiness just to this town, this industry,” she said. “The older I get, I don’t know if it’s perimenopause, but you just care very little about things that were so important to you that are so arbitrary.”
And then there are the little things that were more important than you ever let yourself realise. Saldaña’s last name is spelled with a tilde over the n, but she was billed without it for most of her career. As she ascended to stardom, her name was mainstreamed and mispronounced – “sal-da-na” instead of the correct “sal-dan-ya” – and it’s only recently, in projects like Emilia Pérez, that she has made sure that she is credited correctly.
“It’s not out of arrogance but more because I want to share who I truly am,” she said. “As an artist, I want whenever the opportunity permits to be able to share more parts of myself into my craft. Emilia was all-encompassing in that sense, where I got to reconnect with a part of me that I abandoned.”
It can take a toll when you don’t allow the different parts of yourself to live as one, and lately, Saldaña has sought to repair those rifts. It helped that Perego-Saldaña was eager to take her last name when they wed. “I didn’t ask him for it,” she said. “I was like, ‘Marco, are you sure?’ And he was like, ‘Of course I’m sure. It’s your father’s name, it’s your name.’”
She can already tell that something within her has shifted. Her first inklings came at a dinner party where a stranger bluntly asked her, “What are you?” Initially, Saldaña bristled at the demand, as she had so many times when people asked impolite questions about her Afro-Latina heritage. Then she caught herself and decided to speak about her identity with pride instead.
“You go, ‘I’m not going to come from a place of anger, I’m going to come from a place of love, because I love everything about me and I just want to share it with you,’” she said. For Saldaña, simply articulating that she loved everything about herself – even the tricky, painful things – felt momentous.
“A lot of things are coming full circle,” she said. “It feels like it’s the end and the beginning of something beautiful. And even if it’s just an opportunity to start fresh, I welcome it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Kyle Buchanan
Photographs by: Josefina Santos, Getty Images
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