Zoë Saldaña on fighting discrimination in Hollywood, and why the only way to survive the film industry is to 'kick ass'
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'When I walk into a room I want to blow the place apart, and I expect everybody else to have that same confidence, because we are all equal'
Don’t be fooled by the futuristic minidress – the USS Enterprise’s Zoë Saldaña is as tough, proud and phaser-ready as they come, discovers Martyn Palmer
The deck of the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk, Spock and the rest of the Star Trek boys get to run around in smart trousers and a practical top as they try to save the planet from a deadly foe. Zoë Saldaña, on the other hand, will be sporting an ultra-short minidress as she hurtles through outer space.
Practicality in womenswear is apparently not high on the list of priorities in the 23rd century, she notes. ‘Comfortable? Are you kidding me?’ she laughs. ‘You can’t even sneeze in that outfit. But, hey, it looks great.’
It does indeed, and it’s not that she’s complaining. Far from it – because Ms Saldaña can more than hold her own, whatever she’s wearing. And the thing is, she can run as fast, jump as high, shoot as straight and certainly set her phaser – the Trekkies’ favourite weapon – to stun as quick as the best of them.
Zoë, who’s 34, made her name as an action star in movies including Avatar (the biggest grossing film of all time), Colombiana and two Star Trek films, including the latest, Star Trek Into Darkness, in which she plays sassy officer Lt Nyota Uhura, who brings plenty of glamour to the proceedings but certainly isn’t there for decorative purposes.
‘I trained hard for this movie,’ she says. ‘I always do. Because my girl is proactive – she’s involved with the action, so I got to hold a gun and run through fires, and I was more than happy to do all of that stuff. I love to kick ass.’
During her climb to the top of the A-list in Hollywood, she has encountered sexism and racism – although not on any of the aforementioned films – and treats both with disdain. Ms Saldaña is no shrinking violet, and she’s fiercely proud of her heritage: American-born to a father from the Dominican Republic and a Puerto Rican mother.
‘Yes, I have experienced racism, and I’m human, I’m not bulletproof. But I don’t allow it to exist in my world. I’m not going to fight it with violence or become bitter. I’m going to treat it with complete indifference,’ she says.
‘So when I’ve been treated with discrimination, I recognise it and then I move on. I don’t let it sink in because then it becomes “real”. I’m not darker or lighter than anybody – I just don’t see it that way, and I’ve never wanted to be anybody else but me.
‘When I walk into a room I want to blow the place apart, and I expect everybody else to have that same confidence, because we are all equal.’
Her defiantly positive outlook on life was forged by her mother Asalia, who raised her three daughters (Zoë is the middle sibling) as a single parent, initially in a tough part of Queens, New York, and then in the Dominican Republic, after their father Aridio was killed in a car crash (Zoë was just nine years old).
‘My mother didn’t want us to be raised in a dangerous place, so she moved us to the Dominican Republic, to be with our grandparents,’ she says. ‘Mum would live with us there for a year, and then spend a year in New York so she could work and send money back.’
Her mother also instilled a strong sense of independence in all her girls. Men are great, she says, but you have to learn how to take care of yourself and not rely on a partner. ‘My mother is a strong woman and she’s been through a lot.
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Zoë as Lt Nyota Uhura with Zachary Quinto as Spock in Star Trek Into Darkness
She raised all of us to be self-reliant. I’m proud of my Latino-Caribbean heritage, though it’s very traditional. But Latina women are breaking down the stigmas and customs that say women are the property of men and should cater for them, respect them. Well, I’ll respect a man as long as he respects me.’
While in the Dominican Republic she won a place at the prestigious Espacio de Danza to study ballet and modern dance, and by the time she returned to New York, as a 17-year-old, she was all set for a career on stage. She joined the Faces Theater Company and New York Youth Theater, performing in and around Manhattan, and, after a talent scout spotted her, she won her first film role, playing a ballerina in Center Stage, in 2000, when she had just turned 20.
She was on her way and more roles quickly followed – she played Britney Spears’s best friend in the long-forgotten road movie Crossroads; popped up as an immigration officer in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, which starred Tom Hanks as a man stranded at an airport after his country is invaded, and was pirate Anamaria in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, with Johnny Depp.
‘It’s hard enough that 90 per cent of movie roles go to men, so when I do see women written in a way that doesn’t capture their strength, I feel like saying to the writer, “Shame on you”
And then, in 2008, came the two roles that would catapult her into the big time – playing an alien, Neytiri, in James Cameron’s 3D blockbuster Avatar, and Lt Uhura in the reboot of Star Trek, based on the much-loved 1960s TV series created by Gene Roddenberry. Both were huge critical and box-office successes – suddenly she was in big demand.
Zoë’s sense of who she is has informed the roles that she has accepted from the stack of scripts that arrive on her agent’s desk. ‘I like playing a real woman, whether she’s holding a gun or a glass of wine. These delicate little flowers that a lot of male writers tend to create are not an accurate depiction of what we’re about.
‘We’re not spectators, sitting around waiting for somebody else, a man, to solve a problem. So to be portrayed as a fragile creature who needs to be taken care of, well, to me that’s very disappointing.
‘It’s hard enough that 90 per cent of movie roles go to men, so when I do see women written in a way that doesn’t capture their strength, I feel like saying to the writer, “Shame on you. You’re writing women like this in this day and age?” The least I can do is dodge roles that do not represent me.
‘Maybe there are actresses who don’t mind doing that, but not me. I don’t want my body of work to be about that. And trust me, you don’t want me on your team with a project like that because I’m just going to be bored and bitter,’ she says.
But it would be wrong to portray her as some kind of Amazonian only interested in competing with men. She’s much more than that. Physically, she’s clearly stronger than she looks. She’s willowy with a delicate beauty, packs a surprisingly raucous laugh and has a mischievous sense of humour.
Zoë as Lt Nyota Uhura
...and as Neytiri in Avatar
And, as she points out, in many ways she’s very girlie – she loves fashion, hanging out with her sisters, Cisley, now a producer, and Mariel, a nurse, and her friends, and adores her pet pooch Mugsy. ‘I found her in the street near my house. It’s like having a child, and when I’m away working I miss her like crazy.
‘My sisters take care of her when I’m not there, although I’ve just booked her into a pet hotel. I know, it’s pathetic! And I was always the one who said, “I’m never going to dress animals; I’m not going to talk about them as though they’re babies…”, and right now Mugsy is at a boutique pet hotel where she has her own suite!’
Today, in her London hotel, she’s dressed casually in J Brand jeans and a blue Katie Holmes jumper, with a brown Miu Miu trench coat hanging over a chair nearby. (At Paris Fashion Week, Zoë had front-row seats at the Miu Miu show.) ‘I love clothes. To me, it’s art with fabrics. I don’t watch sport; I do get massages and manicures. I have close female friends and we hang out and talk. I’m very close to my sisters. So yes, I’m very feminine. But being feminine doesn’t mean that you can’t be strong. It’s not about hating men. And I certainly don’t hate men, but it’s about getting respect.’
One day, too, she hopes that she will have children. ‘I want to be a mother and I want to pass on what I’ve learnt from the women in my life to my children. You meet men who can’t access their feelings and that’s down to the way they were raised. If I have a son he will grow up learning to express himself and to be in touch with his vulnerable side. And that won’t make him any less of a man.
‘It’s all about balance. It’s the same way with women who can’t change a tyre. I’m not saying that it’s something you have to do all the time, but you should learn how to do it in case you need to. You can always tell the guys that have had good women in their lives, in the same way that you can tell women who have been around good men. If I had a little boy I would bring him up to respect women.’
At the moment, Zoë is single. She was in a long-term relationship with actor Keith Britton for ten years, which ended in 2011, and last year had an on-off romance with The Hangover star Bradley Cooper, after they met on the romantic drama The Words. ‘I’m sorry, that’s the one thing I won’t talk about,’ she says when I mention Cooper’s name. ‘But I will say that I’ve been blessed and I’ve known great people in my life.’
Zoë at the Star Trek: Into Darkness film premiere in Berlin last month
Work, she admits, dominates her life right now. Filming Star Trek Into Darkness took up four months, with the cast from the first film – Chris Pine as Captain Kirk, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Zachary Quinto as Spock – reuniting for the sequel, with Benedict Cumberbatch joining as John Harrison, a terrorist who threatens to cause mass destruction on earth.
‘Ben is amazing,’ she says. ‘And it’s easy to be fooled by him. He comes in with this cute English accent and his delicate face and he’s so sweet, and then you watch him go to work playing this bad-ass villain and go, “Oh my God, this man is the bomb,” as we say in Queens. That guy is very good.’
Zoë has loved science-fiction films ever since she was a child and balks at the suggestion that a lot of women aren’t interested. ‘I grew up with a mum who’s a sci-fi buff and I’ve read Dune [by Frank Herbert] three times. When I was 13 I dressed up as Lady Jessica [a character in Dune] for Halloween.
‘So this is definitely my arena and I find it hard to believe that there are people on earth who don’t like it. The one thing I’ve learnt since I was a little girl is that it doesn’t matter where a story is set – in the future, a period piece or on a boat – if it’s good, and it has rich characters, it will not distract you from getting into the story.
‘Star Trek may be set in space, but it’s about people. Yes, there’s fantastic action and big set pieces, but at the heart it’s great storytelling. Why wouldn’t women dig that?’
She recently completed work on Nina, a biopic about the late, great blues and jazz singer Nina Simone, who was also a civil rights champion. It was an opportunity to branch out from the action genre and show her acting chops. It was also, she says, her toughest professional challenge to date.
When it was announced that she was to play Nina Simone, there were some, including the singer’s daughter Simone Kelly, who criticised the choice and claimed that she wasn’t dark-skinned enough to play her. She doesn’t want to be drawn into the controversy, preferring to let the film, which will be released later this year, speak for itself.
‘It was wonderful to play her but it was also a very scary experience. It was intense and there was a lot of scrutiny when we were getting ready to shoot the movie, and that affected me for a minute, but then you just have to get on with the job.
‘It was the most surreal, wonderful and spiritual experience I’ve had in my career. Nina was iconic, ahead of her time, a woman with a beautiful vision, and I hope I can do justice to that. She was ignored by society, ignored by the world, because it was a different place back then, and people weren’t ready for her. But as the years rolled by her voice got louder and louder.
‘I was born in the 1970s and Nina died in 2003; sadly I never had the chance to meet her in person. I met her through her incredible music, I researched her by reading books and downloading interviews, and seeing how feisty she was, what a fantastic spirit she had. Playing her has given me so much.’
Zoë with her mother Asalia at an awards ceremony in LA last year
Over the coming weeks Zoë will be recording her own versions of the songs that Ms Simone made famous, including ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’,
‘I Put A Spell On You’ and ‘Wild Is The Wind’. Is she daunted? ‘I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never sung professionally, but I think I have a passable voice. I can carry a tune! This is a very different challenge, though, because I know that I have to capture the essence of a unique voice.’
As much as Zoë loves the work, she plans to redress the balance between acting and her private life in the coming months.
‘I don’t really plan things. Today is as far as I go, but I do feel that I’ve worked so hard over the past few years, and year after year I said no to those precious moments – birthdays, visits to family, children being born – because I needed to be somewhere, to do a movie or whatever. And you blink and ten years have gone by. I’ve said yes to work and now I want to say yes to life, too.
'I want to pay attention to that because I don’t want ten more years to go by and to feel I’ve missed out on a lot of laughs and a lot of experiences because work took up so much of my life.
‘Work is an extension of who you are but it shouldn’t be everything. And my life, my family, is very important to me and I need to pay attention to that more. It’s all about balance, I guess.’
She hopes to travel to South America and to get back in touch with her Caribbean roots. ‘I’m not going to be buried with medals, I’m going to be buried with memories. And you have to make memories.
Zoë wowed at the Academy Awards Oscars, Vanity Fair Party in Los Angeles last February
‘I have friends from all over South America who are first- or second-generation Americans now – they come from Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela – and I’ve heard about these countries and now I want to see them for myself. And I want to go back to where my family is from.’
Typically, she’s planning on travelling in Zoë style. ‘Oh yes,’ she laughs. ‘Backpacking with a few five-star hotels along the way. I’m a girl, after all.’
She certainly is. A tough, proud, kick-ass girl, but definitely a girl.
Star Trek Into Darkness is in cinemas now
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