It’s crazy to imagine, but Zoe Saldaña is a major part of three huge franchises. From “Star Trek” to “Avatar” to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Saldaña has been in more than her fair share of massive franchise blockbusters. And apparently, that sort of work started to become a struggle for the actress and her artistic ambitions.
Speaking to Women’s Wear Daily, Zoe Saldaña opened up about her life and career, as she prepares for the release of the long-awaited “Avatar” sequel, ‘The Way of Water,’ hitting theaters in a couple of weeks. And as she looks back at her life, particularly over the past decade, Saldaña felt stifled by her commitments to the aforementioned franchises.
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“I feel that for the last 10 years of my life, I’ve been just stuck. I felt stuck doing these franchises,” Saldaña said. “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. But it also meant that I felt artistically stuck in my craft of not being able to expand or grow or challenge myself by playing different sorts of genres and different roles. So this is something that I wanted to do for a very long time. And wrestling, too, with this pressure that society puts on women that your youth is gone as soon as you have children and you go into your 40s.”
She added, “But today, now that I’m 44, I’ve been able to have these opportunities, and I took control over my aging and I took control over my voice and how I consider myself as a woman. And I’m so happy that I’m able to collaborate with filmmakers and producers and people in this industry that want that for women, that want women to be ageless and who don’t fetishize women’s youth. And so it’s interesting. It’s really interesting.”
Like it or not for Saldaña, her time in franchises doesn’t seem to be coming to an end in the foreseeable future. Paramount is deadset on trying to get a new “Star Trek” film made with all of the modern cast back. She’s definitely attached to at least one more Marvel project, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3,” but with the MCU, it’s hard to know if that will be a sendoff for her character or not. Then, let’s not forget “Avatar,” which has been taking a lot of her time over the past several years and will continue to do so, if her character sticks around and isn’t killed off or anything.
But even with that in her future, it’s clear Saldaña is happy to step away from those big roles and settle into more artistically challenging work in the future.
