Zoe Saldaña Doesn’t Take Any of This for Granted

Eliana DocktermanWed, April 15, 2026 at 11:14 AM UTC

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—Photograph by Mark Seliger for TIME

Zoe Saldaña’s three sons always say she’s flexing. Every time she suggests her family watch one of her movies, “They’re like, ‘Mom, stop flexing.’” Her physical training for the Taylor Sheridan series Lioness, which required her to carry around 50 lbs. in the oppressive Texas heat? A flex. Her historic Oscar for Emilia Pérez last year? A flex. “My youngest was like, ‘Did you win for supporting or lead?’ And just because he said that, I’m now trying not to sabotage myself. I’m trying not to think, ‘Well, now I need to go win lead.’”

Unlike her kids, Saldaña’s husband, the producer and director Marco Perego-Saldaña, is her most vocal cheerleader. During a recent vacation, he arrived at the breakfast table each morning bearing the previous day's box-office numbers for Avatar: Fire and Ash. Then one day, he announced what could rightfully be called the ultimate flex: Thanks to massive franchises like Avatar, Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Avengers, Saldaña had become the highest-grossing actor in the history of film, overtaking Scarlett Johansson to claim that title. In total, her movies have grossed more than $15.47 billion worldwide.

This story is part of the 2026 TIME100. Read James Cameron’s tribute to Zoe Saldaña here.

“My husband is my helium. He’s always gassing me up, like, ‘You’re amazing, you’re beautiful,’” says Saldaña. “Meanwhile, his offspring can’t stand me. Don’t get me wrong, they’re proud of me. But they don’t watch anything I’m in. It’s the most humbling thing.” She allows that her kids, 11-year-old twins and a 9-year-old son, won’t watch her movies because they “don't like violence, which I'm so proud of.”

Despite their lack of enthusiasm for her work, during a Zoom call from her California home, Saldaña’s sons wander in and out of the room, asking for snacks but also hugs. Since winning her Oscar, Saldaña, 47, has taken what she considers a bit of a break. Sure, she had to film the latest season of Lioness opposite Nicole Kidman and promote the Pixar movie Elio as well as the latest Avatar film. But for someone who used to book back-to-back physically intensive productions, the ability to drop off her children at school represents a meaningful shift. “I’ve been healthy. I’ve been present with my family,” she says. “I feel like when I take these mental breaks like that to live, then I become really creative and really energized.”

She has been listening to different frequencies for positive energy, specifically 963 Hz. And she is taking a break from podcasts. “Not listening to other people's hysteria and opinions has helped me a lot,” she says. She’s been working on and off for years on an idea for a young-adult story and finally has the time to write a treatment. And it was during this relatively restful period that she actually got to reflect on and celebrate her box-office victory.

It was in some ways sweeter than winning an Academy Award. “It feels different because I'm a woman. I’m a proud woman of color. I’m a daughter of immigrants. People like me never even imagine breaking a record,” says Saldaña, who is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent.

She is aware that the high will be fleeting. “I know that this is not going to be forever,” she says. “It's only here now, until, you know, Scarlett comes up and breaks it again. As long as it's Scarlett or another woman, I'm going to be happy. And if it's a woman of color, I'm going to be even happier, because I know how much harder it is to shatter a ceiling.”

Saldaña has built a career bringing extraterrestrials to the big screen. She’s played a voyager in Star Trek, an assassin in Guardians of the Galaxy, and a mother-warrior in Avatar. If Disney greenlights a fourth Avatar film, she will go back to the alien world of Pandora, which she first joined two decades ago. And she says she would return for another Guardians or Star Trek. “What I like about these films is that they cater to a younger audience,” she says. That’s crucial because the film business depends on luring young moviegoers back to cinemas. When Saldaña, who launched her career with movies like teen dance drama Center Stage and the Britney Spears-starring Crossroads, began to sign up for genre film after genre film, she used to worry about getting pigeonholed. She no longer has that concern. “If we say, ‘F-ck what others think,’ there’s no such thing as being typecast.”

But the majority of blockbuster genre films have been made by men and primarily for men. Earlier in her career, Saldaña was often the sole woman in a group of otherwise male leads. At first, she saw that as a form of rebellion. “I grew up in a matriarchal environment. I am one of three sisters, and I'm in the middle, and we learned to appreciate each other by having each other's back. And so that is my foundation,” she says. “I needed to step away from that in order for me to be autonomous.”

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Over time, though, she found herself missing the camaraderie of women, the mutual understanding that comes with working alongside artists through girlhood, motherhood, menopause—“all the hormones!” she exclaims. “I felt so lucky and so special being the only girl. There were projects in which all the guys were awesome and the director was awesome, and I felt like there was no gender. And there were other experiences where I was the only girl, and it felt isolating.”

Now, she’s focused primarily on promoting the stories of women, hopefully by writing and directing films herself. She cites The Substance and Wuthering Heights as the kinds of female-directed films she would like to usher to the screen. She spent hours discussing the former film—its themes around the futility of trying to fight aging, its savage humor—with her mother. She went to the steamy romance with a group of girlfriends for a raucous screening, though her husband spent the whole time texting her suggestive photos. “He was sending me pictures of himself putting his fist in his mouth, putting his fingers in his mouth, just to be a sport about it,” she says, imitating the photos and laughing. “He was like, ‘I know why you want to see that movie.’ So what? I love the fact that the movie made me smile, and he made me smile.” Both movies, she said, felt uniquely feminine and too fleeting. "We're complex creatures," she says, "that deserve more screentime."

The female experience isn’t purely the domain of female directors. Saldaña vows eternal loyalty to Avatar filmmaker James Cameron in part because he boasts a long history of writing badass female characters, from Sarah Connor in Terminator to Oona Chaplin’s Varang in the latest Avatar movie. Saldaña's own role required her character, Neytiri, to assist a mortally wounded Ronal (Kate Winslet) in giving birth during a battle. The Avatar series frequently strives to reflect global problems like the climate crisis and colonialism. Saldaña discussed the real-world parallels of this birth scene with Cameron and Winslet before filming. It’s a sequence that has stuck with her for years. “There are women that give birth and still have to pick other people's crops and work in a field. There are women that are giving life in times of war in Gaza. So it happens every day,” she says. “I think it's important that we never lose sight of how privileged we are in the Western world and knowing that some of us have a choice to give birth and either go back to work if we want to or not. And the rest of the women in the world don't have any choice but to survive and try to protect the life that they're welcoming into the world from a bullet, from a bomb, from overexposure to the sun while you're picking avocados in some field.”

In the film, Neytiri takes the child from its lifeless mother and carries the newborn girl into battle. It was an unexpectedly triumphant moment for the actor. “There is a juxtaposition of having a broken heart for women that have to go through that,” she says, “but also feeling so connected to the sisterhood of women that during anything we are going to show up for each other, and we're going to help each other give birth and help each other die and help each other heal.”

—Photograph by Mark Seliger for TIME

Even before she broke the box-office record, Saldaña had begun to understand what it meant to have power in the film industry. When Jacques Audiard was developing Emilia Pérez, he delayed production by a full year to accommodate Saldaña's prior filming commitments. He even rewrote the character for her. She doesn’t take the gesture for granted.

That role allowed her to draw on skills she had rarely exhibited onscreen: singing and dancing. After premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, Emilia Pérez picked awards at the Golden Globes and BAFTAs, and, eventually, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Saldaña. But the movie also stirred debate over its depiction of Mexico and its portrayal of its titular trans character. It faced backlash when a journalist unearthed a series of offensive tweets written by the film’s lead, Karla Sofía Gascón. And yet Saldaña does not retreat from the film. Asked to name her most underrated work, she pauses before answering resolutely. “I'm proud of the cast and the crew of Emilia Pérez,” she says. “I also am aware of the topics that were brought to my attention that maybe could have been done a little differently. But I'm really proud of Jacques Audiard, the cast and the crew, and the heart and the humanity that we put into it, and I will always defend that. So, you know, obviously we're always so afraid of controversy, but I think it's important to be honest.”

The willingness to speak candidly about past controversies without slipping into defensiveness is a rare trait for an A-list actor. Perhaps it’s an outlook only possible for a star secure in her accomplishments. Saldaña describes herself as highly competitive, someone who can be too hard on herself. But with time and a (literally) alien level of success, she has given herself permission to ease up and consider her influence.

She has been thinking a lot about how her recent accolades will impact her future work. “Ego is like cholesterol. There's good cholesterol and then there's bad cholesterol,” she says. “No artist creates without an ego. The ego is what makes you want to share, what gives you the confidence to share it with the masses. By acknowledging our ego, we can also keep it in check.”

As our Zoom call wraps up, one of her sons enters the room again, oblivious to the fact that his mother is discussing having starred in some of the biggest movie franchises of all time. He climbs over her back and whispers something in her ear. She promises that she will find the tuna salad in the fridge. She turns back to the camera. The most commercially successful actor in the history of cinema has to sign off. Her kid needs lunch.

Wardrobe: Petra Flannery; Hair: Mara Roszak; Makeup: Vera Steimberg; Prop: Lux Wright; Production: Ruth Levy, Madi Overstreet; Location: Smashbox Studios, LA.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Entertainment”