Zoë Saldana, who moves like a cat and curses like a sailor, is curled up in a booth in the restaurant of a non- descript hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, talking animatedly. The words tumble over one another; arms occasionally shoot out to illustrate a point; hair is pushed this way and that. Her eyes are wide, excited. She’s wearing a V-neck Diesel sweater—gray on the front, orange on the back—and pale jeans cling to her legs, which are folded underneath her, impossibly. Her limbs seem slightly elongated, and are as slender as ribbons. Her fingers, too, appear just fractionally longer than they should be. Her face is almost entirely free of makeup. Out in the lobby, stylists and stylist’s assistants and managers and manager’s assistants talk hurriedly on BlackBerrys, planning out Saldana’s day. They are no doubt pacing back and forth on the marble floors now just as they were while we waited for her to come out of the elevator, almost two hours ago. But Saldana, whose own BlackBerry sits face down on our table, untouched for the duration of our interview, seems in no hurry whatsoever. “This is an interesting conversation!” she says, leaning back and spreading her arms wide across the banquette. “They can wait a little bit. So, what were we talking about?” There’s no beat, no need for a reminder. “Sarah Connor! Yes! I wanted to be her. And Sigourney Weaver? Ellen fucking Ripley? Oh my God. I had posters of her. I would be like, ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’ My mom would only let me say that word if it was in that context. And I would say it all the time!” She adopts Ripley’s voice, “‘Get away from her, you bitch!’ Love it!”
Despite the fact that Saldana—who has two films opening this month: The Losers and Neil LaBute’s remake of Death at a Funeral, also starring Chris Rock and Tracy Morgan—is sick and in the grips of a schedule that is taking her around the world doing press for Avatar, she seems on top form. It’s only 10:30 a.m., but she orders from the lunch menu—chicken noodle soup, and some hot water with lemon and honey—talking to the waiter in Spanish. Outside, muffled by the thick, expensive glass, the never-ending music of New York plays on: Machines crack and crash and gasp and wheeze and sirens sing their shrill, incessant songs. alarms screech and buzz, demanding attention that never comes. People yell and whistle for taxis. Breaks squeal. Doors slam. In the pauses, you can hear the birds singing in the trees.
“There’s just something about this city, isn’t there?” says Saldana, looking across the room at an elderly couple, sitting by the window. She grew up here, with her mother, father, and two sisters, Cisely and Marial. “I remember, we had a very European way of living. We would go to Chinatown to get our fish, and to Bleecker Street to the Italian butcher shop that had been there for a century. There was this place in Queens, right by where we grew up—in Spanish we call it un vivero—and they had live poultry. You go there and choose what you want while they’re still alive. I’m telling you, the taste is completely different from something that has been frozen for a week.”
When she was nine, Saldana’s father died in a car accident, and soon afterward her mother moved the family to the Dominican Republic, where they would stay for the next seven years. “I can’t imagine what that would be like,” she says, cupping her drink in her hands. “You build a family with someone and then one day, you speak with them on the phone and then they’re gone. And you look at the three kids that you’ve created like, ‘What the...?’ You’re a housewife, you didn’t go to college, you’ve never really worked. It’s just like, ‘What the fuck?’ So she made all these amazing, fucked-up sacrifices: We went from this urban life to running around barefoot in the countryside, and being taught how to gut fish,” she remembers. “We were learning how to climb coconut trees—let me tell you, they are fucking dangerous!” The basics are apparently simple: Pick the skinniest one, grab on, and use your feet to climb. “We were little fucking monkeys!” says Saldana, smiling happily. “I would do my homework in guava and mango trees.”
A couple of years after arriving in the Dominican Republic, Saldana’s mother saw an ad in a newspaper for a scholarship to a ballet school, sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive. Saldana, who had just reluctantly given up rhythmic gymnastics because she was “too long,” initially had no interest. “I didn’t want to dance! I was like, ‘Ick! That’s for girls!’” she says. “But we were poor at that time. My mom was a struggling widow and my grandmother would sell the family jewelry to pay for another year of tuition when we were growing up.” Saldana and her sister Cisely went to the audition and were both selected from more than 300 girls for the scholarships. “and that was the beginning of a beautiful fucking romance,” she says. “That was my Xanax, let me tell you. It fucking mellowed me out. It put all of my demons in order, and connected the dots like, ‘You want things to come out this way? You’ve got to give it time.’”
But as much as Saldana found certain aspects of living in the Dominican Republic charming, she was an American, a New Yorker, and soon began to yearn for the pace of the city. “We were living year to year when it came to schooling—public education, unfortunately, was not that great in the Caribbean,” she says. “our mother chose it because the alternative would have been coming back to Queens in the early ’90s, when it was very fucking dangerous and drug-infested, and [you are] taking the risk of losing one of your children to either drugs or teenage pregnancy. She was like, ‘I’d rather be starving but with my entire sup- port system in the Caribbean.’ We tried, but we just hated it. It was like, ‘What’s for dinner? Let me guess: rice and beans again!’” And it wasn’t just the cuisine that was getting to the Saldana sisters. In order to provide for them, their mother would leave them with their grandmother and go back to New York for months on end, working as an office assistant and a housekeeper, cleaning toilets in hotels. “Hotels much like this one, actually,” says Saldana wryly, looking around the room. “Anything to fucking just save a little money and send it back. That’s why she’s a freaking God to us.” One day, Saldana sat down with her mother and broke it down: “‘I know what you’ve done, and I’m so grateful, but we can’t do it anymore. This culture is beautiful, thanks so much for teaching us. We’ll forever embrace who we are and where we come from, but this is not where we want to be.’”
Back in New York, Saldana, now 17, realized that she was never going to be a principal dancer, and that she no longer had the passion for ballet that she once did, and started looking for something else to do. “And that wasn’t college,” she says. “I didn’t want to waste money, and didn’t believe in the institutional system of making money for the sake of education. And so I told my mother I wanted to try acting.” At her first audition, for The Wizard of Oz at an off-off-Broadway theater on 57th Street, she went up for the part of the Scarecrow. She didn’t get it, but ended up in the ensemble and soon after started an internship at a theater group in Brooklyn. “It was very urban: I was helping street kids who were dealing with incest and drugs and domestic violence,” she says. The group traveled the country, and went to Germany. One day, a manager spotted Saldana and Cisely in a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and started sending them to audition for commercials. “As a New York actor, you know you’re going to make it when you book at least one episode of Law and Order,” she says. “And I did that! And then I got [dance movie] Center Stage [2000]. and then, little by little, I kept getting films....”
A DECADE LATER, Saldana is one of the most in-demand actors in Hollywood. She has followed up a string of memorable characters (see Kat in After Sex, 2007—not to be confused with Kit in Crossroads, though that, too, is memorable, I suppose—and her incredible performance as Andrea in Haven, 2004) with leading roles in J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek as Uhura and as Neytiri in James Cameron’s Avatar, the most successful film ever. She chooses her parts carefully, and has learned that being a Latino woman in Hollywood can sometimes mean dealing with people who should know better. “I’m not going to always [play] the victim,” she says. “I’m not going to be the one waiting for a man to come. It has nothing to do with ego, it has to do with me. I’m just the same as everybody else: as a man, as anybody. I don’t feel like I’m being unreasonable. I’m not a hater, and I’m not a rebellious person. I don’t believe in racism, and I don’t believe in discrimination—you have to not believe in these things in order for them not to exist in your life. But I do believe in a mental conviction that I am. That’s it: I just am. The same way you are a writer, great. But you are. Period. First. That’s it. And I like to tell myself that. You know when people go, ‘Oh, we want to go traditional with the part...’” What does that mean? I ask. “When they want to say, ‘We want to go white,’ they have very smooth ways of saying it, and the recent one is the word traditional,” she replies. “[I’ve heard] ‘Oh you know, you’re just not what we were looking for; your skin is a little darker...’ Compared to what?! My skin is just my skin. It’s dark if you compare it to someone who’s lighter. The one thing that we don’t realize is that, as a civil society, we have a template of what is considered perfect, what is considered appropriate, what is considered traditional, acceptable, whatever. and we like to compare everything to that.” Outside on the sidewalk, a drill whirs into action. “And I just don’t bother with it. Whatever role Angela Bassett or Kate Winslet can get, I can certainly at least get through that door.”
Saldana is rightly vehement on the subject of racism, talking even faster than usual, not touching the soup or the drink, arms waving, fingers flexing. “I just despise it when people get up on stage and they discriminate against [other] human beings,” she says. “I’m not saying we’re not supposed to inherit what happened in our history—we have to be conscious of it because that’s the only way we’re going to learn and not do it again. But just because we have to inherit the history, we don’t have to inherit the hate. Or the ignorance. And racism isn’t just one way: It can be the other way around. I don’t want to listen to an African-American comedian who is literally spending his entire fucking skit talking about a different race. I don’t want to support that. I don’t want to raise children who are going to be conscious of it and say, ‘I’m not racist! I have a white friend! I have a black friend!’ If you need to fucking count, then you’re very conscious about it, and you just need to fucking leave.”
And as much as Saldana is incensed by racial discrimination, so she is passionate about the role of women in Hollywood today. In The Losers, which opens this month and tells the story of a group of covert CIA operatives left for dead, on a mission to wreak vengeance upon those who tried to assassinate them, Saldana plays the thoroughly bad-ass Aisha, who is as comfortable with a gun as Julia Child is with a whisk. “I’m naked, kicking ass, firing guns. I fucking loved it!” she says, beaming. “Loved. It. I love sex and rock ’n’ roll. You have no idea. anything that is sensual and empowering for a woman. I look at women throughout history—from Jane Fonda, who took fucking roles that were challenging but who, at the same time, was that delicate flower every now and again, to Angelina Jolie. I really like women who incorporate their bodies in what they’re doing. It’s not just, ‘Oh, Mr. Daaaarcy,’ or ‘Oh no, save me, I’m hanging from this fucking cliff.’ No, they were like, ‘Just put me up in the helicopter, give me that fucking gun, and get some motherfuckers.’” I love that! That was me! I was like, ‘Mommy, is this wrong? Am I weird?’ and she was like, ‘Zoë, honestly, when you were six and the other girls your age wanted to be butterflies and princesses, you wanted to be a ninja. and you were a ninja for five Halloweens straight.’” It’s worth noting here that to prepare for her role in Haven, Saldana went to the Cayman Islands and “partied my tits off! I wanted to know what it was like to be self-destructive and to feel the world spinning. I wanted to know what it would be like to play a girl who is the trophy of the family. Because that’s what you are: as a woman in certain cultures, you’re the big, rich, healthy cow that they trade in for a handshake or 40 sacks of rice.”
Working with Abrams, Cameron, and Steven Spielberg (who directed her in The Terminal), Saldana has been afforded precisely the kind of strong female roles she so obviously gravitates toward. “God bless the man who embraces that a woman can be as strong as a man, and that a man can be as strong as a woman,” she says, emphatically. “That said, not only are [the men I work with] known for writing amazing, strong, real roles for women, they’re also known for giving men a heart and giving them fragility and vulnerability. Jim [Cameron] is going head to head with his ex-wife [Kathyrn Bigelow, who directed The Hurt Locker] at the Oscars this entire awards season. He knows amazing women. He has surrounded himself with amazing women his entire life. And I think it probably all started with his mom. I don’t know. Women are kick-ass around Jim. In his life. In his films. and mind you, he’s a truck driver. like, this man is a guy. He’s like, ‘Yo. Shoot ’em up. Gun. KnifeWhatever.’”
There’s no need to dwell on Avatar here—if you haven’t seen it, please do so at once (in 3-D and, preferably, in an IMAX). But for all its good points (I mean, just look at it) and its bad (that dialogue...ouch), it has made Saldana a star on a level she has never experienced before. She has a lot to thank James Cameron for. “The man is amazing,” she says, stretching her legs. “Your heart is pounding as you hear the steps of him coming to meet you. And then you meet him and there’s something so unassuming about him. He doesn’t abuse [his power] like, ‘dance for me!’ He sat down and was like, ‘Are you ready to meet Neytiri?’ He just kept looking at me, and every now and again he would go, ‘My God, you look so much like her.’ I’m thinking, OK, so he probably imagined some Amazonian girl—I had really long hair at the time—wearing really little shit with like, a bow and arrow. I had no idea she was blue and nine feet tall. But for some reason he was like, ‘You look so much like her.’ And then I met her. There was a little sculpture in his office, on one of his coffee tables. I fell in love. I just couldn’t talk. And just...if anything had gone differently, I would be having a very different conversation with you, or even no conversation at all.”
The Losers, Death at a Funeral, and an indie called The Burning Palms see Saldana in very different territory from her recent blockbusters, but later this year she goes into production on the follow-up to Star Trek, which will also be helmed by J.J. Abrams (there is also talk of another Avatar film but no details have yet been announced). “There are other projects and they’re amazing, but with those on the horizon it’s just about trying to fit everything in,”she says.“I would like to work with women because I have only been directed by one female—Tamra Davis for Crossroads. Women are tough. Female artists are really tough, and eventually I do see myself producing and directing. I just...I like power. And as an actor, I don’t have as much power as I would like.”
Saldana is dealing with her celebrity much like she seems to deal with everything else in life: head-on and matter-of-factly. I mention that for someone who is so concerned with the representation of women in film, she must feel a lot of responsibility, especially being in movies that so many people are watching. “That keeps me grounded,” she says. “It keeps me from fucking up. I have chosen a career where, at some point, you’re going to lose your privacy. And people are going to feel that you belong to them or whatever. That’s fine; I can negotiate with that. The other negotiation is that you might not be able to afford to have a bad day as much as anybody else, because there are people looking up to you. So do I really want to have that last drink and then roll out of here? Tumble, ass out? no. I’m the kind of person it would kill if I’m giving permission for other women out there to do it.”
For now, Saldana says, she is taking things a day at a time. “I am dealing with what’s in front of me, because I’m scared of losing my sense of reality,” she says, wrapping a scarf around her neck and unfolding herself for the last time. “It can happen very quickly, in such a way that you’re not aware of it. At the end of the day, I don’t want to lose the fact that I’m my mother’s daughter. Take everything else away, and I’m still going to be her daughter. And I like that title more than anything else.”