Zoe Saldaña Has Steven Spielberg To Thank For Her Star Trek Start

As a Trekkie, I need to get this off my chest right away: the Vulcan salute in the picture above is incorrect. Zoe Saldaña's thumb should be extended.

The above picture is from Steven Spielberg's 2004 film "The Terminal," a film inspired by the true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri. The story goes that Nasseri, an Iranian citizen, was traveling from London to Brussels via Paris, but was waylaid in Paris when he lost his refugee passport. Unable to leave Terminal 1 of the Charles de Gaulle Airport, Nasseri simply stayed there. He lived in the airport from 1988 until a medical emergency in 2006.

In Spielberg's film, the Nasseri stand-in was a character named Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks) a citizen of a fictional Eastern European country called Krakozhia. While Viktor was traveling, there was a violent coup in his home country and its very existence was thrown into question. He was left without a valid passport and decided to wait it out by living in the airport. Spielberg constructed an entire airport terminal set to shoot in, and Viktor's ability to make a home and land a job inside the dull glass box of an airport involved a lot of creativity and visual innovation.

Viktor is a kind soul who likes to help people (although it's often in exchange for goods and services) and he aids a food truck driver named Enrique (Diego Luna) in romancing the comely immigration officer Dolores (Saldaña). Viktor learns that Dolores is a Trekkie who loves to attend "Star Trek" cons dressed as Yeoman Rand. Enrique can now break the ice.

In a 2009 interview with TrekMovie, Saldaña revealed that Dolores' "Star Trek" fandom led quite directly to her being cast as Uhura in J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" film five years later.

There is a cute scene in "The Terminal" where, after Enrique learns that his would-be paramour is into "Star Trek" and approaches her on those terms, Dolores finally comes around by giving Enrique the Vulcan salute. However, Saldaña admitted to TrekMovie that before appearing in "The Terminal," she was woefully undereducated when it came to "Star Trek." Knowing that Dolores was a Trekkie, she immediately began doing research. Her first research stop was Roger Nygard's 1997 documentary about Trekkies — called, natch, "Trekkies" — and his then-new 2004 follow-up "Trekkies 2." Saldaña explained:

"I didn't even know what the word 'Trekkie' meant. So I didn't know what conventions were. I knew of 'Star Trek,' but not extensively. So part of doing my research to have the feel to be a Trekkie and to go to these conventions, I saw a couple of the episodes and I saw 'Trekkies' 1 and 2."

Saldaña admitted to being moved by the passion of the fandom and developed an appreciation for what "Star Trek" was and why so many people adhered to it so strongly:

"I remember watching it and the people around me were sort of laughing at everything and I felt so overwhelmed and I felt so happy that I remember thinking, 'I want to be like that, I want to be so passionate about something that I incorporate it in my everyday life and it is the reason I wake up and it fulfills me.' So it was through the fans that I became very, very curious. What is it about this show and these characters and these stories that drew people to keep it alive after 40-some years after only a few seasons?"

In 2024, it's 58 years.

Saldaña got deep enough into the Trekkie mindset that she felt a central conceit of Abrams' film would be rejected by Trekkies out of hand. Perhaps infamously, the film shows Uhura engaging in a romantic relationship with Spock (Zachary Quinto), the famously emotionless half-Vulcan. To entangle those two characters, Saldaña knew, would upset hard-line Trekkies who had never seen any kind of romantic chemistry between the pair:

"I thought J.J. was out of his mind when he and [screenwriters] Bob Orci and Alex Kurtzman decided to take that route. My concern was what effect it was going to have on the fan community and whether or not it was going to go according to what they had known for so long. But at the same time there was no way to disprove that something like that had taken place before on the Enterprise. So after I gave myself that permission I allowed myself to go back to the script and read the story and focus on these characters and their journey and it made perfect sense to me."

So, she did her job as an actor, delving into the characteristics of Uhura's romance and her relationship with a co-worker. She saw her Uhura as being ambitious and skilled, still in the midst of developing the "swagger" she saw in her forebear, Nichelle Nichols. Spock, she felt, would be drawn to that passionate intellect, and she would, in turn, get glimpses of Spock's passion.

It may still be controversial, but Saldaña did the right thing. Although she was also wise to be wary of Trekkies' reactions.