Zoe Saldaña Was ‘Afraid’ of Being Labeled a Sci-Fi Star — Now She’s Embracing a Genre That’s More Than a ‘Geeky Thing’

Here’s a piece of trivia you might have heard in recent months: In Hollywood big-buck history’s grand annals, only one performer has ever been part of four films that grossed more than $2 billion each. That performer is, of course, Zoe Saldaña, who has starred in four of our biggest franchises (the “Avatar” series, the “Avengers” features, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise, and the rebooted “Star Trek” films). The four films that carried Saldaña to the incredibly impressive stat include “Avatar,” “Avengers: Endgame,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avatar: The Way of Water.”

But the star’s relationship with those franchises has occasionally proven a little tough for her. In 2022, the actress revealed feeling sometimes stifled by the demands of big-budget movie-making. “I’m very grateful for the opportunities that they provided, from collaborating with amazing directors and getting to meet cast members that I consider friends and getting to play a role that fans, especially children, love,” Saldaña told WWD. “I feel that for the last 10 years of my life, I’ve been just stuck. I felt stuck doing these franchises.”

Saldaña’s latest turn, in Jacques Audiard’s lauded “Emilia Pérez,” has certainly helped the star tap back into some of her deepest creative impulses. In the film, she sings, she dances, and she even gets to speak Spanish. The film was a smash hit at Cannes, and earned Saldaña and co-stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz a shared Best Actress award. Saldaña is tipped as a major player in this year’s Best Supporting Actress race, and at last week’s SCAD Savannah Film Festival, she also picked up the Vanguard Award for her performance.

As Saldaña embraces the latest chapter of her career, she also seems to have softened a bit on her franchise worries. During the festival, she joined The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg for a live recording of his “Awards Chatter” podcast, in which the performer walked through her impressive 25-year career. Of course, those big franchise films did come up, and Saldaña offered some new perspective on her designation as a sci-fi standout and a franchise queen.

When asked about how her life changed in 2009, when Saldaña starred in both J.J. Abrams’s “Star Trek” and James Cameron’s first “Avatar” film, she said, “For the very first time in my life, I started to understand that what I do gives me an ability to connect with individuals that I will never meet. That’s big. Children in Africa, in Japan, if they see ‘Avatar’ and they’re transfixed by what they see, and I am in that story, I will forever be connected to them through a moment, something that was really special to them. Understanding that is a gift and, since then, I’ve been chasing that high.”

‘Avatar’Disney

After that one-two punch, Saldaña continued to also make comparably smaller films, including “Colombiana,” “Out of the Furnace,” and “Infinitely Polar Bear.” In early 2013, Saldaña was tapped to star in what became her third major franchise: “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

“I was the most hesitant, of all films, with ‘Guardians,'” she said. “James Gunn approached me through my team, I believe it was in the beginning of 2013, and he was somebody whose projects I did not really know about. I was like, ‘Is that that “Scooby-Doo” guy?’ … And I saw the films, and I’ve always been very pragmatic, and I was like, ‘I like his artistic direction, and I think that he did great with the effects, I like the comedy, but I really don’t…’ At that point, I was like, ‘I can’t do another film in space.'”

Feinberg asked the star if her hesitations were rooted in being afraid of what audiences would think of her taking on yet another space-set franchise film, and Saldaña said, “I was afraid. I was afraid! If it were up to me, guys, I would be in space every other month. I like space. I like imagining the unimaginable. I like playing there, it’s the best sandbox… You get to invent and reinvent and retell and reshape and start from scratch. It’s a blank canvas, blank space.”

She continued, “I wish people understood that science fiction is more than just, ‘Oh, a geeky thing.’ Even that is offensive, because you’re basically labeling a community as less-than, when this community of people that love science fiction, that have a natural affinity to it, they’re so much more beyond, because they imagine the unimaginable. And I’ve always felt kindred with individuals like that, James Gunn, J.J. Abrams, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, these are individuals that, when they were kids, they were reading science fiction, and they felt like outsiders, and they were isolated from communities where they didn’t really fit the mold. And these are my people. I wanted to do ‘Guardians’ from the get-go, but I was so afraid of being labeled. … ‘Oh, then you’re only gonna do science fiction.'”

‘Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2’©Walt Disney Co./courtesy Everett / Everett Collection

Feinberg asked if, after taking on the “Guardians” role of Gamora and then becoming a part of the “Avengers” franchise in turn, the things she worried about in terms of public and audience perception indeed became issues for the star.

“No, I think I became the issue,” she said. “You know, these were opportunities, these were gifts that were being handed to me because of the work I was putting in, and I was too naive around that time to recognize these opportunities. I’m proud to have been a part of all of them, to have worked with the Russo brothers, to have worked with such amazing, prolific actors. I wish I would have understood then just the importance of where I was. I was so afraid of being labeled, I almost felt like during that time I was half-in and half-out, and deep, deep down, I loved Gamora so much more than I was able to admit. I loved her.”

You can listen to the full episode of the “Awards Chatter” podcast right here.

A Netflix release, “Emilia Pérez” is now in select theaters and will start streaming on the platform on Wednesday, November 13.