Zoe Saldaña has spoken, on more than one occasion, about how she had an extremely bad time on her first big Hollywood picture, Disney's Pirates Of The Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl—to the point that she declined to return for the blockbuster franchise's subsequent installments, despite her character being a quick fan favorite. In a new interview this week, Saldaña revealed that the experience was so bad that she nearly swore off big-budget movie-making, period, until she was saved by a plucky little outsider artist by the name of Steven Spielberg.
Saldaña, who was promoting her new film Emilia Pérez this week, spoke, not for the first time, about what a bummer Gore Verbinski's Pirates was. "I knew with that experience the kind of people that I wanted to work with," Saldaña explained, in a way that made it clear she didn't mean "in a good way." "The crew and the cast, they’re 99 percent of the time super marvelous. But if the studio and the producers and the director, they’re not leading with kindness and awareness and consideration, then that big of a production can become a really bad experience and you may tip overboard. And I kind of did." (Saldaña has never stated publicly who made the filming of the movie such a nightmare for her—although she has said in the past that producer Jerry Bruckheimer apologized to her for the ordeal several years later.)
By contrast, Spielberg, who cast Saldaña in her next studio feature, 2004's The Terminal, "restored my faith that big can also be great." Adding that the legendary director made her feel "so good and so safe" on the set of the Tom Hanks dramedy, she reminisced about how he would play music on the set to promote chill vibes, and even gave her artistic advice. Given that Saldaña now has one of the best franchise track records in modern Hollywood—having lent her talents to Star Trek, the MCU, and James Cameron's Avatar (to say nothing of her more independent efforts), the good feelings appear to have stuck well enough to keep one bad experience on a fake pirate ship from ruining the whole business for her.
