By Kyle Buchanan
In this modern era of franchise moviemaking, Zoe Saldaña has earned plenty of capital.
The 46-year-old actress 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.
But one thing Saldaña didn’t have until now is a starring vehicle like “Emilia Pérez,” which scored 10 Golden Globe nominations including a supporting-actress nod for Saldaña. 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,” a series that “Yellowstone” showrunner Taylor Sheridan had pursued Saldaña to star in. That obligation, plus an extensive press tour for “Avatar: The Way of Water,” meant she couldn’t take on a new project until deep into 2023.
Saldaña figured this was the end of her dream. 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 the acclaim. It was difficult to snap in and realize 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 from France to Texas to shoot “Lioness,” she was watching the online livestream 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. She initially felt bashful about displaying her Cannes trophy 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?”
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