Zoe Saldana wants to kick-ass and be the next Angelina Jolie
In the last Zoe Saldana post, some of you took issue with the idea that I wouldn’t write about Zoe because I thought people wouldn’t be interested in her. Just to clarify: I wasn’t claiming to “ignore” Zoe because she’s a woman of a color and I, according to some commenters, just “hate” women of color. I was debating whether to cover a woman that I didn’t consider particularly relevant (or likeable, for that matter), and that I didn’t think people were very interested in. I find Zoe to be at times boring, and at times insufferable, which is merely my opinion. If you disagree and think she’s God’s gift, good for you. Feel free to disagree and comment about her – because I won’t write about people that don’t get comments.
Anyway, Zoe has a feature in the new issue of GQ. She’s promoting Colombiana, that La Femme Nikita-looking movie that looks… not good. Zoe is really trying to become “the next Angelina Jolie” – so much so that the article even name-drops Jolie by calling Zoe “the ass-kickingest female star since Angelina Jolie. Like Jolie, Saldana’s physicality— all fluid angles and long lines—is part of what makes her so much fun to watch; before the bad guys are finished staring, they’re already dead.” Here are some highlights:
Zoe Saldana was out dancing the other night when a fight broke out one table over. Her companions scattered; she stayed put. “I knew exactly what I was going to do,” she says. “Kick this door, grab this, move that guy out of the way. Then I started laughing: Oh, my God, I still have Cataleya in my system.”
Saldana’s action roots run deep. The actress, 33, grew up partly in the Dominican Republic, where she learned to climb mango trees and gut fresh-caught fish. She remembers herself as “a feminine tomboy. I had my plastic swords, my ninja stars—but I still wore lipstick.”
Next year she’ll trade the martial arts for a couple of marital dramas, though don’t expect any doting wives: “It gets pretty boring when all you are is the support system for a male character,” she says. “I want to be in the small percentage of women who don’t settle for conventional roles.”
[From GQ]
There’s some stuff about all of the training she went through for this part in Colombiana, and how she trained with the same guy who worked with Matt Damon on the Bourne films. She’s committed, I’ll give her that, and she does work hard. But I tend to think the Jolie comparisons are too soon, too much and too over-done. It feels like too many actresses are trying to work the Jolie Method instead of carving out their own unique niche in Hollywood.
Photos courtesy of GQ.
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