Zoe Saldana reflects on growing up on ‘Star Trek’ Original series, learning on ‘Avatar’ and ‘GATG 2’
Star Trek Beyond arrives next week, just in time for the 50th Anniversary of the Original Series and star Zoe Saldana discussed the franchise, working in Sci-Fi, her Avatar role and much more with Australia’s SMH.
“I would look over and all these three women were glued to the television, watching the series in Spanish. It’s so funny,
Saldana says of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother, all watching Trek. “It was the first series that I would experience vicariously through their eyes.”
Saldana joined the crew for the 2009 reboot under director J.J. Abrams and Beyond is the third new film.
“This was something that the universe and I were working in conjunction to make happen,” she says. “Every now and then I have moments in my life when I look up and say, ‘How did you know I wanted this so bad’?”
It was James Cameron’s Avatar which gave the actress her acting skills as she was transformed into Neytiri.
“It was the most amazing, challenging, scariest experience I’ve ever had approaching a character and trying to conceive a character,” Saldana says her 18 month production on the biggest film of all-time. “I really wanted to explore it and do, not my best, but do it perfectly.”
“I didn’t go to Juilliard or Yale to study acting. This was the best form of schooling I ever had.”
Playing Gamora in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy requires an early, early morning in makeup.
“Guardians makes me miss every other character I’ve done in every other movie,” she says. “It makes Uhura seem so low-maintenance.”
Saldana is in Atlanta shooting GATG 2 and promoting Trek 3, “One thing simply kept leading to another,” she says.
“On a personal level, it’s what I like. It’s the literature I like to read. It’s not that I’m ahead of my time, but … The future moves at a pace to my liking. It moves me a great deal. It’s so boring to read things that are gone.”
Read the full interview here.
Star Trek Beyond opens July 22, 2016.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 arrives next summer, May 3, 2017 with the first of four Avatar sequels set for Christmas 2018.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2 is filming in Georgia
