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Zoe Saldaña might be a leading action star and an Academy Award-winning actor, but a bad experience early in her career nearly put her off the industry entirely.
You might not remember right off the bat, but Saldaña’s first time on a massive set was in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Playing the minor role of Anamaria, a pirate who has been scorned by Jack Sparrow and is recruited to the crazy fucking crew of the Black Pearl. Ringing any bells yet?
Well, regardless, she was there, starring alongside A-list goddamn names like Johnny Depp, Kiera Knightley and Orlando Bloom. While it might have been a dream come true for many young, inexperienced actors, Saldaña told the BFI that it almost sent her ‘overboard’ from Hollywood.
“I walked away not really having a good experience from it overall,” she explained, “I felt like I was lost in the trenches of it a great deal, and I just didn’t feel like that was OK.” As a young person just starting out on their career, it’s probably incredibly overwhelming to all of a sudden be chucked in the deep end with huge stars and an unforgiving big studio.
And she knew it was the size of the production that was the issue. She didn’t blame her cast and crew, who were “99% of the time super marvellous”, but explained that if the bigwigs, the director, the producers and the studio aren’t “leading with kindness and awareness and consideration, then [it] can become a bad experience and you may tip overboard”.
With the sheer amount of revered names on the cast list of Pirates, it’s no surprise that someone so early in their career, like Saldaña, was treated as little more than an extra. And sadly, it probably didn’t help that she is both a woman and a person of colour, as we know how the industry likes to treat people of those backgrounds. However, she’s yet to go into detail on her experiences.
They were, however, bad enough for her to swear off returning to the franchise. If things had gone well, it could have given Saldaña more visibility earlier in her career and set her up as a great returning character. Alas.
It was also bad enough that she nearly walked the plank of big-budget productions altogether.. Luckily for her, and us depending on your feelings on Marvel films and Avatar, her following role was on a much kinder and bigger production with the sweetheart that is Steven Spielberg.
Saldaña appeared in The Terminal, alongside Tom Hanks and Gabriel Luna, as an immigration officer and Star Trek fan (which just so happened to help her land her future breakthrough role in the Star Trek reboot). “I worked with Steven Spielberg eight months later, and he restored my faith that big can also be great,” she said of her time on the set of The Terminal. And from then on, she seems to have stuck with it.
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