Zoe Saldaña has quite the impressive resume. Just in the last decade or so, she’s appeared in Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy (as well as multiple Avengers movies), and Star Trek.
It’s fair to say that working on projects like that, sometimes back-to-back, can become draining. In a new interview, Zoe Saldaña says it has drained her entirely.
When speaking to Women’s Wear Daily, the actress gets candid about her career and where she feels the franchise era has led her. While grateful, she says the massive blockbusters led her to feel “artistically stuck.”
“I feel that for the last ten years of my life, I’ve been just stuck. I felt stuck doing these franchises,” the actress 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.”
Giving herself time to grow, Saldaña says she’s changed her perspective in recent years.
“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,” she continued. “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.”
Saldaña still has quite a busy schedule ahead of her. Not only did her Netflix series From Scratch just launch in October, but she’ll soon appear in Avatar: The Way of Water and return as Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in May 2023 [watch the trailer here].
With the future of the Guardians unknown, and the Star Trek franchise stuck in development hell, let’s hope Zoe Saldaña can give herself more time for passion projects outside of those massive Hollywood blockbusters.
