Zoe Saldaña Revealed the Surprising Reason She Hesitated Taking the Lead Role in Lioness

Whether you know Zoe Saldaña from Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy, or Star Trek, it’s safe to say the actress has really made a name for herself in the industry. So you might be surprised to learn that she hesitated to take her latest role because English is, in fact, her second language.

Born to Dominican and Puerto Rican parents, Saldaña’s first language is Spanish, so, to her, she took a leap when she accepted the lead role in Paramount+’s original show Lioness.

“When [creator Taylor Sheridan] called me four years ago and sent me the pilot of season one, I was scared because English is not my first language,” the actress told Vanity Fair in their Hollywood Issue. “I’m incredibly dyslexic, very insecure, and I suffer from a lot of anxiety, so memorizing large quantities of dialogue was always a very stressful thing. It was easier for me to read pages upon pages of directions of a character and then try to fit this character in my body, in my breathing, and in the way that this character is receiving all the information from its environment. I feel like I’m much more of a reactionary artist.”

Saldaña’s character in the show Joey, however, required even more of her. “To be the one that takes action, that drives the dialogue—that was scary,” she admitted. “But I’d never done that, so how do I know that I’m not going to be good at it if I’ve never really been given the opportunity? So I took it and I trusted [it].”

But Saldaña didn’t just take the role for the challenge, she also felt like she couldn’t turn down a chance to work with the Yellowstone creator. “Lioness has been a journey that has given me the opportunity to collaborate with a different type of filmmaker,” she said. “Taylor Sheridan is sort of like this cowboy that lives on his own off the grid, and that makes a lot of us curious. Either you get the cadence of his writing and the themes that he wants to always talk about, or you don’t.”

Speaking of her home life, Saldaña, who shares three sons with her husband Marco Perego, said that it’s a most Spanish-speaking household.

“If you live a day in the life of my crazy circus of a household, English is probably a language that we use when the kids are out of school,” she said. “When the kids are in school, everybody goes back to their child language, and the language that was first spoken to me—that was sung to me, that I received love in—was Spanish.”

“I do become a different person,” she continued. “I use different tones in my voice when I speak Spanish.”

Knowing that she got to act in Spanish for the first time in her upcoming movie Emilia Pérez, we’re happy Saldaña got to experience that side of her acting too. “It felt wonderful,” she said of the movie. “It felt like going home.”

Before you go, click here to see celebrity women of color share the first movie or TV character who made them feel seen.