Zoe Saldana says she had to work hard because of her race

Apr 4, 2018

Actress Zoe Saldana tells Cosmopolitan magazine that, as a Black actress, she has had to work harder.
 
The 39-year-old beauty, wearing red for the magazine’s cover, says she is not looking for any handouts but she has found the old adage is true in the film industry: Black people have to work twice as hard to get half as far.
 

“I’m not going to sugar-coat it for you,” says Saldana, the star of sci-fi blockbusters Avatar, Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy. “Ask any artist of color if they feel like they have to work harder. I don’t mean that we deserve any special treatment – I don’t want anybody’s sympathy. “

“But,” she adds, “I do encourage empathy because you do have to work twice as hard to make someone in a position of power who has the power to … with your life and your dreams see why they should hire you, and why you are the right person for the role.”

Her Pirates of the Caribbean experience

Saldana says that when she was filming Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl early on in her career, she had to endure less than respectful treatment.
 
“I left that experience feeling a little bitter,” Saldana, 39, told Cosmopolitan for its May issue, adding that she was “dealing with a lot of people who were great and a lot of people who were not so great.”
 
The star told the magazine that she felt as if her time was not valued. Saldana broke it down this way: “If I’m like, ‘I could have been with my family, in school learning, or traveling, but instead I’m here being treated like an extra but in a very despicable way by people who don’t even speak properly…’, my time is being wasted.”

#MeToo and Time’s Up

Zoe Saldana also makes revelatory comments about the atmosphere in Hollywood that gave birth to the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. Saldana’s husband, Marco Perego, is active in #MeToo.

“I don’t want to hear another man tell me, ‘Oh you were my muse,’ ” Saldana says. “I don’t want to be your … muse anymore. I don’t want you to just post me on your wall and look at me. I want you to listen to me!”

–Black Panther now the fourth highest grossing domestic film of all time–

The actress also says we should give men a break if they are trying to change.

“We have to broaden the narrative of #MeToo,” Zoe Saldana told Cosmopolitan. “The same way it applies to victims, it should apply to men who were blind who have now seen. If there is one thing I have to advise, it’s to be kind to the men who are making an effort and don’t put them all in one box. Let’s not do to others what has been done to us.”

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