Like the blockbuster characters she portrays, ZOE SALDANA is no pushover. Driven, smart and endearingly upbeat, she talks marriage, movies and motivation with CRAIG McLEAN.
Zoe Saldana is used to holding her own in a man’s world. More than that, she is used to kicking butt in it. When J.J. Abrams, director of the wildly successful Star Trek reboot, asked the actress how they might update her character, Lieutenant Uhura, for the 2013 sequel, she replied: “Make her more physical.”
The 35-year-old is more than capable. In 2009’s Avatar, she took on the role of Neytiri, the tall-walking, fight-winning alien. This summer, she will play Gamora, a “soldier and assassin, wanted on over a dozen counts of murder” in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. This is a woman who knows her way around a blockbuster movie and the (almost singularly male) directors who make them.
“It’s great to work with women,” says Saldana. “But it’s very awe-inspiring when you meet a man who has absolute neutrality with a woman. It’s a rarity, but to work with men that give you that respect...” She nods, paying kudos to Abrams and James Cameron, with whom she will film the Avatar sequel this fall.
Also on her directorial tick-list is Guillaume Canet, who directed her in Blood Ties. The partner of Marion Cotillard – who also stars in the NYC-set thriller – Canet is a former actor, “which means he gets it; he sees it from the inside out. You know you are in good hands”.
Although Saldana is passionate about her subject, she’s distracted. In fact, it seems as though she doesn’t want to talk to me at all. Her attention is on Mugsy, the tiny dog in her arms, whom Saldana rescued from an LA roadside. He has been neglected today while his mom put in hours being shot for The EDIT, singing Whitney Houston songs as she went. Indeed, hearty, cheerful, dancing through the downtime – rarely has a cover star been so laid-back. Though we have decamped to a Parisian restaurant that opened early for the actress, they won’t allow her to so much as glance at the menu before the kitchen is up and running. Nor will they offer her a drink. They will even make the star of history’s biggest-grossing movie shift out of the way while they vacuum. She just laughs it all off.
Saldana is in Paris filming a TV remake of the classic horror Rosemary’s Baby for the new production company that she runs with her two sisters. She has been working intensely, which might explain why she is so hungry, ordering almost everything on the menu, washed down with pink champagne. After six years of action roles (alongside the sci-fi epics were The Losers in 2010 and Colombiana in 2011), she is allowing herself some me-time.
“I’ve been an active person my whole life,” says Saldana. “The past year has been the only time in my life that I haven’t been to the gym. I’ve been lazy instead of training for something and pushing myself.”
That inbuilt vigor, she says, is “not because I am trying to be skinny. I just like to know how much endurance I have. But this past year I’ve let myself go,” she continues, with pride rather than guilt. “I’ve been eating a lot of Chinese, pasta, rice, beans...”
There is another reason for such gourmand gusto. Last summer, Saldana briefly escaped the five-month Guardians of the Galaxy shoot at Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England, to quietly marry nearby. “I’m not a private person, but I am discreet, so it felt right,” she says. Her new husband, artist Marco Perego, is Italian, so food is part of their marital DNA.
The low-key wedding was typical of the couple who keep hidden from the media glare. Her last rumored romance was with Bradley Cooper, her co-star in 2012’s The Words. Prior to that, she had been in a relationship that she managed to keep below the radar or most of its decade-plus run.
Today, love-flushed, Saldana opens up a little about the man she had known socially for “a while”. Aside from cooking, he’s passionate about playing soccer, something his wife appreciates: “I’m fortunate to be challenged by an artist who also pushes himself.”
And this, too, is what makes Zoe Saldana tick. Not many actors could take on action roles, the satanically troubled Rosemary, and the hugely misunderstood Nina Simone – Saldana plays the bipolar singer in upcoming biopic, Nina. “It was painful,” she says quietly of the project, in which she also sings. “It’s still hard for me to talk about it, because it’s not finished yet.”
She enjoys a challenge, though: diagnosed aged “five or six” with Attention Deficit Disorder, as well as a mild form of dyslexia, her condition may explain her drive, her myriad, concurrent projects, her hand-waving expressiveness.
“I don’t care what people think,” Saldana says. “If I did, I’d be at a different place in life, but I don’t. I can’t fake it. I follow my heart or my friends’ advice. Petra Flannery, my stylist [responsible for the sheer Rodarte dress Saldana wore for last year’s Star Trek Into Darkness premiere], is paramount when it comes to my fashion radar; she pushes me to evolve.”
While the actress has ambition, her focus is on tomorrow. “I have ADD, I’m a Gemini and I get bored quickly. So my next challenge is to direct, because I’m getting tired of just being a particle in the whole telling of the story. I want to be more. I want to be there from its conception.” Watch out, Hollywood: Zoe Saldana has only just begun. But before all that, there’s a more immediate priority: a Chinese banquet that needs demolishing...
Blood Ties is out on March 21.
