Zoe Saldaña, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, which was recorded in front of an audience at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, has been a screen actress for 25 years. She has been described as “the queen of the film franchise,” having starred in installments of the Avatar, Avengers, Guardians and Star Trek series. (She’s the only person ever to have been part of four films that grossed more than $2 billion.) But this year, with her performance as an attorney recruited to help a cartel leader with a top-secret mission in Jacques Audiard’s unconventional musical Emilia Pérez, she has reminded people that she’s also much more.
Those who have already seen Emilia Pérez have gone wild for it. It received an 11-minute standing ovation following its world premiere at May’s Cannes Film Festival, where the festival’s jury awarded Saldaña and her principal co-stars — Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz — the best actress prize. And the film and its stars have been garnering acclaim and accolades ever since. Soon, everyone will have the opportunity to see the film: it debuted in select U.S. and Canadian theaters on Nov. 1 en route to a Nov. 13 debut on Netflix in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.
In the meantime, though, Saldaña has been reflecting on her roller coaster of a journey to this point. As she discusses during this episode, her father was killed in a car crash when she was just nine years old, leading her mother to send her and her sister to live with relatives in the Dominican Republic. There, she fell in love with dance, which led to acting — she sang in local music theater productions and danced in her first film, 2000’s Center Stage. But she wasn’t called upon to sing or dance again until Emilia Pérez. (It’s also the first film in which she has had the opportunity to act in her native language, Spanish.)
In the intervening years, as she describes it, she nearly quit the biz (after a bad experience on 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl), had her faith in it restored (by Steven Spielberg on the set of 2004’s The Terminal) and then, quite by accident, stumbled into “space” thanks to James Cameron, J.J. Abrams and Kevin Feige. In-between her big studio, VFX-heavy projects, she has often returned to smaller-scale art house ventures — among them 2011’s Colombiana, 2013’s Out of the Furnace and 2014’s Infinitely Polar Bear. But it is Emilia Pérez that has reminded others — and Saldaña herself — of the extent of her talent and range.
In just a few months, she will almost certainly find herself an Oscar nominee for the first time, in the category of best supporting actress, for Emilia Pérez. One of the tunes that she performs in the film, “El Mal,” is, in the category of best original song, also a frontrunner, and Saldaña, upon being asked, confirms that she would be willing to perform it on the Oscars telecast if it is nominated and she is invited to do so. It’s all new and exciting territory for someone who has been around for a long time, if never fully seen and appreciated … until now.
