Zoe Saldaña is in the passenger seat of a car, squinting at me in the glare of a particularly generous sun as the expanse of Southern California blue sky and tan desert flashes behind her. Her long dark hair skims her shoulders. It’s an apt setting for the perpetual-motion machine of promotion that she’s currently at the center of; with her role in the buzzy drug-cartel-thriller-cum-musical Emilia Pérez, she is in contention for every major film award for the first time in her 25-year-long career.
Saldaña is en route to a hotel to prepare for an event later tonight, part of the endless rounds of parties and appearances that make up a campaign during awards season. She’s in the thick of it, even though she tells me, “I don’t like networking.” When she started as an actor, she explains, “Every time I went [to a party], I would end up overdrinking and still doing the thing that I wanted to do in the first place, which was to dance and laugh and that’s it. When we’re all working, that’s when magic should happen. Your evenings should be for you to do things that feed your soul.”
Saldaña, 46, has starred in some of the biggest blockbuster franchises of our time: Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Star Trek. Rita, the overlooked and overworked attorney she plays in Emilia Pérez, feels like both a departure from the action and sci-fi worlds she typically inhabits and also a culmination for the actor who impressed a generation with her performances as a dancer in cult-favorite early-aughts films like Center Stage and Drumline.
Emilia Pérez is an unclassifiable, moving, and surprising film. Saldaña’s Rita is pulled into the life of a Mexican drug lord (played by Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón) who desperately wishes to transition into womanhood. What follows is a twisty, visually stunning tale of love, betrayal, and understanding of the self. It blasts right past American culture’s obsessions with appropriation, conservative trans panic, and scoldings about morally ambivalent art and good taste to create a world where only these characters matter.
Saldaña is a revelation. Her training as a dancer is evident from the first scene, and she delivers a powerhouse performance almost entirely in Spanish, while also acting in English and French. There’s a scene in the middle of the movie, during a gala meant to raise money for Mexico City’s victims of gang violence, where the power brokers of the so-called underworld and the elite are brought face-to-face. Saldaña, sickened by the corruption and hypocrisy around her, breaks into a sinuous dance, hissing her anger at the broken world she’s forced to try to do good in. She rolls her wrists, holds the gaze of the camera, and then reaches over to pluck one long blond extension from a well-dressed partygoer’s head, which she rubs across the crotch of her own velvet trousers—a gesture that underlines all of the contradictions of femininity and power that lie at the heart of the movie. For her performance, Saldaña won this year’s Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture.
“In a way, it was just reconnecting with parts of me throughout my life where I felt that kind of desperation,” Saldaña explains. She’s now out of the car and ensconced in a hotel room, from which she will emerge in a few hours in a Schiaparelli denim corset dress to walk the red carpet. At this moment, though, she’s moving around the room, ordering tea, settling.
Over the course of our day, I will learn that Saldaña is a thoughtful conversation partner; she often pauses during a story she’s recounting, careful to consider the other side.
That consideration, that willingness to slow down, to be deliberate, seems to be the key to her public persona. Movie stardom often asks women especially to constantly blur the line between the private and the public to create an image, a brand. It’s notable that in building her career, Saldaña hasn’t played by those rules. When she has a film out, she does the requisite promotion. But when she doesn’t, you won’t find her on Instagram shilling for a beauty or alcohol brand.
As you look over Saldaña’s filmography, it makes sense. She rose to stardom in the early 2000s, when that calculus was particularly punishing. Her first high-profile role, in the Britney Spears 2002 vehicle Crossroads, put her adjacent to the worst aspects of that fame machine. Saldaña was able to sidestep, publicly at least, the more destructive facets of being an early-aughts celebrity. For her next projects, she was guided by visionary film directors like Steven Spielberg and James Cameron. Most recently, she collaborated with prolific television creator Taylor Sheridan on the Paramount+ CIA thriller Lioness. She works best, she tells me, “where there is a vision and it’s so ahead of its time. … You surround yourself with individuals who start believing in it with you, even though you guys don’t know how you’re going to get there, but you’re going to try.”
“Of all my actors, Zoe was the one who put her hand up the most [to ask questions],” says James Cameron, who directed her in the groundbreaking Avatarseries. When we speak over Zoom, he’s in an office with an editing bay behind him, deep in the process of working on the next installment. “I live with her face and her performance every single day [on the editing screens],” he says, laughing. During the production of the first film, Saldaña “was testing me to see if my answers held up to her scrutiny,” he says. “I sort of wish I had her in the room with me when I was writing the script. She wanted to know that there was an intention to make it about the people, 100 percent of what was happening in their hearts at the moment.”
“She just doesn’t really have any weak points,” Emilia Pérez’s writer and director, Jacques Audiard, says. “What really surprised me with Zoe is her energy and her tireless authority. She worked so hard with just extraordinary courage and talent. Sometimes I simply couldn’t believe it. It was absolutely marvelous.”
The drive that has allowed Saldaña to thrive under the pressure of global blockbuster stardom comes from a place of necessity. She grew up in New York City in the ’80s, the middle of three sisters. Saldaña was nine when their father died in a car accident. The loss would have a rippling effect over the rest of her life. “When my father passed away, we all went straight into survival mode,” she says. “We dropped all those little pleasures of life that you do in a day that compel you to calm down. I remember my mom used to wear red lipstick, and she used to walk around in little tight shorts and tight jeans, and she always looked pretty and was always flirting with my dad, and the moment he passed away, she wouldn’t get out of bed for more than a couple of years.”
After Saldaña’s father’s death, her mother sent her and her sisters to live with family in the Dominican Republic while she stayed in the U.S., working two, sometimes three jobs to support them. The change was profound. “You can’t speak English; you have to speak only Spanish. You can’t code-switch,” she remembers. “And then you get bullied because kids don’t understand you. And we weren’t little victims. We pushed back, but then they pushed harder, because they all understood each other.”
“They wouldn’t let us speak English in class,” her older sister, Mariel, says, “but then when we would have a break, you would see us in a corner just connecting. It felt like home.”
Saldaña is incredibly close with her sisters; they own a production company together, Cinestar, which they have used to produce both projects for Saldaña, like the limited series From Scratch, and critically acclaimed shows like Gordita Chronicles. The sisters’ bond, and their ability to work together, stems from that period following their father’s death. “I think that unified us even more because not everybody could relate,” her younger sister, Cisely, explains. “You can’t expect them to have the same capacity and to understand what you’re going through.”
In their new life in the Dominican Republic in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Saldaña and Cisely competed against 600 other girls for spots in one of the country’s dance academies. “Thank God for that. Ballet, at that time, wasn’t what I specifically wanted”—she had wanted to be a gymnast—but she says she found, at 10, that it was too late to begin competitive training. Ballet, though, “was exactly what I needed to settle my restless mind.”
That restlessness nearly came to define her as a child. Saldaña’s public persona may be one of cool competence and professionalism, but that’s not how she sees herself. “I was always off,” Saldaña says. “When you have a child that has ADHD and is dyslexic and has a lot of energy and doesn’t sit still and is unable to listen, you think that it’s on purpose. I just remember asking myself, ‘Why don’t I fit in? Why do I do this?’ It would make me really sad, and it would make me feel really isolated.”
It occurs to me that those feelings of alienation, which came from both culture shock and the experience of neurodiversity, have always had direct parallels in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, the genres where Saldaña excels. “Science fiction requires a certain freedom of the imagination,” Cameron says. “You have to project yourself into a world that you’re unfamiliar with.” Saldaña knows what it means to be a stranger in a strange land.
“I learned in a very innocent, unconscious way when I was very young that I need to live in art, because I find peace,” Saldaña explains. “I can rest when I’m creating.”
How do you build a self from so many disparate parts, through a life already touched by loss? Saldaña returned to New York as a teenager, joining local theater troupes and quickly gaining attention for her talents. One of her through lines was dance. As Saldaña says her ballet teacher Dilia Mieses taught her, “Less is more. If you’re a dancer, you don’t need all that makeup. You don’t need that big hair. You don’t need that loud outfit. It’s how you stand, how you walk.” She traces her life through the women who mentored her. “My life has always been saved, over and over again, by people who have taken me in, by guiding me, raising me, and educating me,” she says.
It’s fitting, then, that Emilia Pérez hinges on the relationship between Saldaña’s Rita and Karla Sofía Gascón’s Emilia. The movie depends on the viewer believing that these two women trust each other. To develop that feeling, the two spent Gascón’s birthday together at Gascón’s house in Paris, where the film was shot. “I prepared a dinner,” Gascón writes to me, “and we spent the evening walking through the streets of Paris, talking, laughing, crying, getting to know each other, and drinking (water). All of that helped us to connect with our characters and make our work more believable and authentic.”
Saldaña’s current role on Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness is another exploration of female mentorship—though it focuses on the dark side. Saldaña plays the spymaster of a ring of covert female CIA counterterrorism operatives. Her character, Joe, is Saldaña’s polar opposite—regimented, where Saldaña is a free spirit—which is why she turned down the role at first. When the role was initially offered to her, she was coming to terms with her lifelong “restlessness,” as she terms it, and beginning to understand how her ADHD and dyslexia have informed her life. “I didn’t feel that I was cut out for it. I was convinced that I was going to fail.” After turning down the offer, she thought about the role for a whole year before calling Sheridan back. “He responded immediately, and he was like, ‘We’re fucking waiting on you.’”
Again and again, when I speak to the people she works closest with, they stress her commitment, her drive, her perfectionism, her focus. But Saldaña speaks mostly of her own determination, like so many of us have, to make a good life, a beautiful life, out of grief and loss and dislocation.
There’s a saying in mental-health discourse that seems to resonate with her: “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” Make the movie dependent on technology that hasn’t been invented yet, when you don’t know the outcome. Stand in a room with hundreds of other girls in a country that is only partially your own and dance through your grief. Star in a musical that is a love letter to trans self-determination, even as we are living through a violent backlash toward trans people’s personal freedoms. When faced with an outcome that is not guaranteed, do it anyway. Or, as Saldaña herself puts it, “What if I just fucking go all in?”
This article appears in the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar.
Production: hair: Jimmy Paul; makeup: Yadim for Valentino Beauty; manicure: Jin Soon Choi for Jinsoon Nails; production: Lola Production; set design: Whitney Hellesen.