How ‘Emilia Pérez’ helped Zoe Saldaña find her “spark”

Zoe Saldaña has a record-breaking box office track record: Her movies have made more than $14 billion, and she is the only actress to have four movies make more than 2 billion bucks with 2009’s Avatar, 2018’s Avengers: Infinity War, 2019’s Avengers: Endgame and 2022’s Avatar: The Way of Water. 

That said, she tells Variety that somewhere along the way she lost her “spark” — which she found, along with Oscar buzz, for the musical drama Emilia Pérez. 

She confesses to the trade, “I felt stuck, in the sense that I was taking things for granted too much. I entered this cycle of doing these sequels, and for some reason I became cavalier with them.”

She also adds, “I wish I could go back and do a better job for [her Marvel character] Gamora and Uhura [in the Star Trek franchise],” commenting, “I think I did enough, but I could have done more. That’s just how I am.”

Although her dyslexia and her own “self-sabotage” make auditioning difficult — and she hadn’t done so in a while, what with all the sequels — she auditioned for French filmmaker Jacques Audiard for Emilia via Zoom. Twice, in fact.

He tells the trade she “constantly dazzled” him as Rita.

“Rita was supposed to be only 25 years old; however, as soon as I had Zoe in front of me, I realized that I’d been mistaken all along,” Audiard says.

The actress now says, “I just have this brand-new little spark. And I feel like Emilia really did that for me.”

Emilia Pérez, which is also generating Oscar buzz for Zoe’s co-star Selena Gomez, opens in select theaters in November and on Netflix Nov. 13.

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