Zoe Saldaña

Zoe Saldaña (born June 19, 1978, Passaic, New Jersey, U.S.) is an American actress who found great commercial success performing in the science-fiction and superhero franchises Star Trek, Avatar, and Guardians of the Galaxy. In addition, Saldaña has won acclaim for her emotionally complex portrayals in films such as Center Stage (2000) and Emilia Pérez (2024). For the latter movie, she received an Academy Award for best supporting actress.

Early life

Saldaña spent much of her childhood in Queens, New York. She and her two sisters were raised speaking Spanish at home by their Puerto Rican mother and Dominican father. However, when she was nine years old, her father died in a car accident, and she moved with her family to the Dominican Republic. There she studied dance at the Ecos Espacio de Danza dance studio. When she was 17, she returned to New York City and began performing with youth theater groups.

Initial roles in film and television

After two small guest appearances (1999) on the television series Law & Order, Saldaña was cast in a prominent role in the movie Center Stage (2000), about students at a New York City ballet school. She next appeared in a series of teen flicks, including Get Over It (2001) and the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads (2002), and then had a supporting role in the higher-profile movie Drumline (2002). Saldaña had a small but memorable part as a female pirate in the surprise hit movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), and she played an immigration agent in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), which starred Tom Hanks as a man forced to live in an airport terminal. For the next few years, however, Saldaña appeared in only minor movies and TV fare.

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Rise to stardom with big franchise roles

Saldaña landed two iconic roles in 2009. She was cast as Lieut. Uhura in the movie Star Trek, which reimagined the characters of the original TV series, and, through the technique of motion capture, she embodied Neytiri—a high-ranking member of the Na’vi, a humanoid race indigenous to the exoplanetary moon Pandora—in James Cameron’s sci-fi film Avatar. Both movies were major hits. Saldaña portrayed Uhura again in Star Trek into Darkness (2013) and Star Trek Beyond (2016). She also played the green-skinned warrior princess Gamora in the sci-fi/superhero blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), a role she reprised for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023). She reprised her role as Neytiri in the box office blockbuster Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022 and in Avatar: Fire and Ash (2025).

Diverse roles in later works

In addition to performing in those high-profile movies, Saldaña appeared in the comedy Death at a Funeral (2010) and took lead roles in the thrillers The Losers (2010), Colombiana (2011), and Out of the Furnace (2013), among others. She played Rosemary in the 2014 TV miniseries adaptation of Ira Levin’s suspense novel Rosemary’s Baby and controversially portrayed singer Nina Simone in the badly received biopic Nina (2016). Her other credits during this time include the thrillers Live by Night (2016) and I Kill Giants (2017) and the horror comedy Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020).

In 2021 Saldaña lent her voice to the animated musical film Vivo, which featured songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the TV miniseries Maya and the Three, about a Mesoamerican warrior princess. The following year she appeared in David O. Russell’s period satire Amsterdam, the action comedy The Adam Project, and the Netflix limited series romance From Scratch. In 2022 Saldaña portrayed an undocumented immigrant in the drama The Absence of Eden, directed and cowritten by Marco Perego; she and Perego have been married since 2013 and have three sons.

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In 2024 she appeared as a Mexican lawyer helping a drug cartel boss obtain gender-affirming surgery in Jacques Audiard’s acclaimed musical drama Emilia Pérez. Saldaña won a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar for best supporting actress for the role, which required her to speak and sing in Spanish. Also that year she starred as a CIA operative in the TV series Lioness, created by Taylor Sheridan.