Credit: Far Out / Kevin Payravi
Are you currently wishing away the rest of the months left in 2026 so you can get to Avengers: Doomsday, specifically hoping to see Zoe Saldaña appear as her green-skinned Guardians of the Galaxy warrior Gamora? Then you’re bang out of luck about the second bit, I’m afraid.
That’s because, rather like her Guardians co-star Dave Bautista, she has decided that she was done with the whole Marvel blockbuster thing, and if the Russo brothers want to feature the character, they’ll have to find a different actor to play her, which is fair enough.
It’s not like she needs the cash; alongside Scarlett Johansson, Saldaña is the highest-grossing actor in film history, meaning she can easily afford to say no to a film that already features basically anyone who has ever been a superhero in any movie, ever.
The reason Saldaña is in that fortunate position is that she has appeared in not one, but four major Hollywood franchises over the last two decades, including James Cameron’s never-ending ego trip Avatar, plus JJ Abrams’ Star Trek reboot, three Guardians movies and 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which was apparently the only one she really didn’t have a fun time on at all.
That could very understandably have been down to either Keira Knightley’s acting or Johnny Depp’s incessant stumbling, but according to Saldaña herself, it was much more wide-ranging than that. She told Time Magazine, “I left that production with a really bitter taste of Hollywood. It was big, it was excessive, it was egocentric”.
Inspired by the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney World, the film was quite bizarrely directed by Gore Verbinski, who had been in charge of the Japanese horror The Ring the previous year. It had a colossal budget of $160million, much of which went on salaries for the many stars like Depp, Knightley, Geoffrey Rush, Orlando Bloom and Jonathan Pryce, but they needn’t have worried because the film brought in five times that at the global box office.
It was so successful, in fact, that it spawned another four films all the way up until 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales, but Saldaña had long since moved on. The year after the first film was released, she was cast by Steven Spielberg in the airport comedy The Terminal with Tom Hanks, which she was much more positive about, saying, “It was a really great part. It gave me hope and confidence”.
She used that confidence to go on a run rarely equalled by any actor, combining those blockbusters with movies like the 2010 comedy Death at a Funeral, the David O Russell drama Amsterdam, and then winning a ‘Best Supporting Actress’ Oscar for 2024’s Spanish musical Emilia Pérez.
This week, a third season of the Taylor Sheridan-created thriller Special Ops: Lioness kicked off, in which the actor plays the lead of Joe McNamara, and Saldaña is also in the midst of making Avatar 5, which isn’t even out until 2031, having already wrapped on Cameron’s fourth instalment, which, let’s face it, very few people asked for in the first place. You’ll have to wait until 2029 to see that one, and hopefully, by then, the director will have forgotten to release it.
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