Zoe Saldaña is has done a lot of different things in her career. What she hadn’t done before Emilia Peréz was speak Spanish in a movie. The actress, whose mother is Puerto Rican and her father Dominican has always identified as a proud Latina, but the language doesn’t always come as easy to everyone who identifies as part of the community.
Saldaña is better known for her iconic roles as Gamora in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and in the Marvel Universe and Neytiri in the Avatar movies, and has also appeared in big franchises like Star Trek and Pirates of the Caribbean. So, for her, Emilia Peréz is just another step in a very successful career. And it’s one that might come with awards recognition.
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The movie, which also stars Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz, has been widely considered a front-runner for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. Zoe Saldaña, alongside costars Karla Sofia Gascón, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz won the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival. In it, Saldaña plays Rita, a high-powered lawyer that helps the titular character to fake her death and start a new life after gender-confirming surgery.
But does Zoe Saldaña speak Spanish as well as her character? Or did she have to learn it for her role in Emilia Peréz?
Does Zoe Saldaña speak Spanish?
Yes, Saldaña speaks Spanish fluently. The actress and her two sisters, Cisely and Mariel, were raised bilingual and speak both English and Spanish. In fact, Saldaña considers Spanish her first language and has shared that the home she shares with husband Perego, is mostly a Spanish-speaking household.
“If you live a day in the life of my crazy circus of a household, English is probably a language that we use when the kids are out of school,” she told Vanity Fair in their Hollywood Issue. “When the kids are in school, everybody goes back to their child language, and the language that was first spoken to me—that was sung to me, that I received love in—was Spanish.”
Back in 2014 she told Cosmopolitan for Latinas’ that she and her husband were raising their kids multilingual.
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“Of course (our kids) will speak the language we speak; my sisters and I grew up learning French and speaking English and Spanish, and because of that we’re able to understand Italian and Portuguese,” Saldaña said. “But I’m going to have to make a conscious effort to speak Spanish to my children, because I speak Spanish.”
The actress, however, coped to a little bit of code-switching when it comes to her English speaking persona and her Spanish speaking one. “I do become a different person,” she said. “I use different tones in my voice when I speak Spanish.”
Despite her fluency in Spanish and the fact that she has given multiple interviews in the language, Emilia Pérez is Saldaña’s first experience acting in Spanish. “It felt wonderful,” she told Vanity Fair about the experience. “It felt like going home.” She’d previously shared that “Since I started my career in cinema, I rarely had the opportunity to play a full-on Latina speaking fluently in Spanish,” adding, “I was yearning for that.
