Avatar and Avengers’ Zoe Saldana on family, fear and starring in the two biggest films ever made
Zoe Saldana reveals why she feels ‘conflicted’ by starring in the two biggest box office hits ever, and how motherhood set her up for her role in Avatar: The Way of Water.
Zoe Saldana admits it was little awkward for her the day that Avengers: Endgame overtook Avatar to become the highest grossing movie of all time.
As the only actor to have a leading role in both blockbusters – playing the blue-skinned Na’vi warrior Neytiri and the green-skinned Guardian of the Galaxy Gamora – the American’s loyalties were torn between the James Cameron sci-fi epic that made her career and the all-star, all-conquering Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero sensation.
To further complicate matters, Saldana was filming the Avatar sequel The Way of Water at the time and Cameron would later reveal his ambivalence for the Marvel and DC superhero movies, and what he perceived as their lack of emotional stakes.
“It was very conflicting when Endgame took the crown – and trust me, it was conflicting to be in the room with Jim,” Saldana says with a laugh.
“I’m not going to be revealing anything that Jim hasn’t already revealed himself in his interviews. I think he’s been pretty vocal about his opinions on certain super-fantastical stories out there and what they’re lacking, what he wishes they had more of, what he believes and takes pride in what his stories have. So, it was just funny.”
But though they might not always see eye-to-eye cinematically, Saldana says there is mutual respect between the two camps as evidenced by Cameron and Avatar producer Jon Landau mingling with the Marvel executives when she was awarded her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018.
Cameron also congratulated directors Joe and Anthony Russo and Marvel boss Kevin Feige when Endgame hit the top spot in 2019 – then they returned the favour when Avatar reclaimed its title last year after a re-release in China.
“Everybody’s entitled to their point of view because you believe in what you’re making,” Saldana says. “But, at the end of the day, I don’t think that deters a level of respect they have for one another. And, as a child that may have been feeling like I was stuck between two worlds, they come together quite beautifully and graciously, and work together as well.”
To say that Avatar changed the lives of Saldana and her Aussie co-star Sam Worthington, who plays her love interest Jake Sully, would be a massive understatement. Until that point she’d been best known for a small part in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film as well as unremarkable roles in Guess Who and The Terminal. After Avatar became a genuine pop culture phenomenon, and partly at Cameron’s recommendation, she landed her Marvel role as well as that of Uhura in the hit Star Trek reboot. But it wasn’t just her career that benefited.
The environmental themes of Avatar, in which the native Na’vi fought off a rapacious band of humans trying to strip their home in search of a rare and precious mineral, also made her question her own relationship with the planet.
“Along with many people across the globe, it changed my life in the sense that it was the very first time that I started to think about the environment,” she says. “I started to look around my life and be aware of the planet as a character that needed consideration, that needed thinking and needed care. Because, before that, I really feel like I was having a very unconscious life when it came to my relationship with my environment.”
Saldana says that the long shoot using trailblazing performance capture technology on the first film helped her form such a bond with Worthington that she now considers him to be “my brother”. The two stayed in each other’s lives throughout the 13 years between films and were both delighted when Cameron finally summoned them to start work on the long-anticipated sequel. Saldana says that while she and her co-star were “giggling like five-year-olds” filming love scenes on the first film, they both came to The Way of Water as new parents in a very different stage of their lives. Saldana has three boys with her Italian artist husband, Marco Perego, and Worthington has three boys with his model wife, Lara Bingle.
“Sam has come such a long way and I hope he thinks the same of me as well,” Saldana says. “We came back as new parents. We were very mushy with the content that we were dealing with, as Jake Sully and Neytiri, and we had constant conversations about that and we really are there for each other.
“Sam is an exceptional actor. He feels so much, he respects his director and his cast, and he’s very loyal. Working with Sam is just comforting. It’s safe. It’s wild, because he’s such an unpredictable Aussie as well, and I have learned to appreciate that.”
Saldana and Worthington’s new-found parental status also dovetailed neatly into the story that Cameron wanted to tell in The Way of Water, which he says is about family more than anything else. The sequel is set more than a decade after the original film, with Jake and Neytiri forced to flee their home to protect their children and discovering just how far they will go to keep them safe.
New people, places and creatures of the Na’vi home world, Pandora, are explored, including a water-based tribe that necessitated the actors having to learn how to hold their breath for more than five minutes to film complicated performance capture sequences in huge custom-made tanks.
Saldana says she doesn’t think she’d have been able to play a parent in the first film had the part been written that way. Having a six-month-baby in tow when she started filming The Way of Water made for a difficult shoot at times, but it also gave her a visceral connection to Neytiri and her fierce maternal instincts.
“Having children really compromises you emotionally and psychologically, and in a way that I have never known before,” she says. “The fear of losing something that you love more than life itself is unimaginable – and that fear is paralysing. So, if it wasn’t for the constant guidance of Jim, who has been a parent longer than I have, certain emotional leads through Neytiri would have been really hard for me to tap into.
“I remember endless nights of tears and talking to my husband when I would arrive home from work, or talking to Jim or sometimes talking to Sam in the parking lot, and if it wasn’t for their support, I think it would have been a lot harder.”
Worthington also agrees that fatherhood and the heightened “protective instincts” that come with it changed his approach to Jake, and circles back to Cameron’s frustration with the glut of superhero films and the director’s desire to create his own universe, with three more Avatar sequels in various stages of development.
“Jim approached it that, in the first movie, you have this reckless, gung-ho warrior and his equally effective warrior wife, who have no responsibilities, and what happens when we raise the stakes for them and give them something other than themselves and where does that take us?
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“He has mentioned superhero movies and he wasn’t satisfied with how that story wasn’t being told there, so he thought he would take that approach with Avatar. It changed the game because it’s not just Jake’s journey, it’s the journey of a family, and we can now all relate to what is going on on a bigger level.”
Avatar: The Way of Water opens in cinemas on December 15
Originally published as Avatar and Avengers’ Zoe Saldana on family, fear and starring in the two biggest films ever made
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