Zoe Saldaña is having an amazing year. The blockbuster actress is picking up Oscar buzz for her role in Emilia Pérez. And her success is all the more inspiring knowing that she endured a terrible tragedy at nine years old and turned to the performing arts in order to cope.
Saldaña was still a child when her father, Aridio Saldaña, died in a car accident in 1988. Naturally, the incident had a terrible effect on her family, especially her mother, Asalia, who suddenly found herself having to raise three daughters without a husband by her side. It was devastating, but Saldaña found solace in ballet.
She spoke about it to W Magazine on January 3, 2025. The interviewer brought up how Saldaña got the chance to show off her dancing skills in Emilia Pérez and asked Saldaña how old she was when she learned the skill. “I was 11 years old,” Saldaña said, before going on to reminisce about how her “pointe work was quite bad.” But regardless of how difficult she found certain aspects of ballet, it became a driving force for her in the wake of her father’s death.
“I did it for 10 years vigorously, sometimes six hours a day. Ballet became my therapy, my medicine, my confidant, my solace during a time when I was going through a lot,” she said. “My father passed away when I was 9, and my mom went through a really difficult time. There were days when she couldn’t get out of bed because she was so sad. When you’re 9, you don’t really understand that, but she knew that she needed to keep us busy. So I started ballet, and I went full throttle into it because I needed it.”
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That ballet kept her going as the family healed. But Saldaña eventually decided it wasn’t going to work out as a career. “I had a moment, when I was almost 18, when I realized I wasn’t going to shatter that glass ceiling and become a prima ballerina. I didn’t have it in me to be in the corps,” she said. But her dance abilities had already carved a path for her in the entertainment industry. It was because of her ballet background that she won the role of Eva in the 2000 film Center Stage, and that was one of the things that kicked off her career. Bigger and bigger roles followed until she won the role of Uhura in the rebooted Star Trek, and now she’s an international megastar.
Saldaña still thinks about her father often. On the promo trail for her animated movie The Book of Life, she spoke of the grief she still felt over losing him. “I almost wished I would have this movie when I was growing up because loss is something I experienced at such a close range in my life when I was very, very young,” she said at the time. And she also called upon her experiences of grief when filming her Netflix miniseries From Scratch, which is about a woman losing her husband. “The thing about grief is that it’s ongoing,” she told USA Today in 2022. “It will never get better; it just becomes manageable.”
But ballet helped Saldaña so much during those early years that now she hopes her sons, Cy, Bowie, and Zen, might take up the practice. “Studies have shown that it is so therapeutic for men to take any form of dance at a very early age or throughout their lives because they carry so much tension and emotion,” she told W. And if anyone would know about dance as therapy, it’s her.
Published: Jan 3, 2025 01:09 pm