Saldana’s Hollywood Woes
2 min read
In the July issue of Allure magazine, Star Trek Beyond‘s Zoë Saldana talked about the difficulties of sustaining her pregnancy with her twins without risking her own health, and dealing with Hollywood before and after their births.
Often, twins come early, but in Saldana’s case, it was necessary because the pregnancy was negatively impacting her own health. “The boys came at thirty-two weeks,” she said. “They found protein in my urine; my platelets crashed.”
So the doctors were obliged to deliver the twins early. “I didn’t qualify for an epidural, so I delivered under general anesthetic,” said Saldana. “I didn’t even meet them until a day later.”
Once Saldana returned to work, she ran into the same difficulties that many working mothers do, the need for child care. “I was starting to feel that I was…difficult,” she said. “For babysitting to be ‘considered a perk,’ or ‘Give this to me; I’m having a diva fit’? No. This is a necessity that you must cover for me in order for me to go and perform my job.”
It bothers Saldana that other women aren’t as supportive as they should be when it comes to day care. “The fact that there are women working in these studios — and they’re the ones [enforcing] these man-made rules,” said Saldana. “When are we going to learn to stick together?”
Another source of irritation is the sexist attitude she runs across in Hollywood. “A producer said, ‘I hired you to look good in your underwear holding a gun,” said Saldana. The movie in question may have been The Losers, in which she portrayed a Bolivian woman who helped an elite US Special Forces black ops team.
And in another project, Saldana was tagged with the “bitch” label. “I was told walking into [a] project that they really wanted me for the part, and that any input or ideas I had to please share them,” she said. “That’s what I was doing, and this producer was so bothered by the fact, that he had to disrupt his vacation to call me and tell me to stop being a difficult bitch. I thought, ‘Wow, it’s real. It really happens.'”
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