The Box Office Juggernaut That Almost Made Zoe Saldaña Quit Acting

Zoe Saldaña is one of our best blockbuster actresses — and she's got the receipts to prove it. In the last decade plus, she's played Uhura in the rebooted "Star Trek" films, Neytiri in James Cameron's "Avatar," and Gamora in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No matter how natural or made-up her character appears, she brings her A-game. (No wonder she was disappointed that her "Avatar" part felt overlooked.)

Her first blockbuster was "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," which unexpectedly turned one of Disney's most famous theme park rides into a successful movie. Saldaña plays Anamaria, a supporting character and a member of the pirate crew recruited by Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) on Tortuga. Anamaria introduces herself by slapping Captain Sparrow and yelling that he previously stole her ship, which he amends to "borrowed without permission." (For all we know, Anamaria's boat could be the sinking one we first saw Jack ride into Port Royal on.) 

Despite that, Anamaria is the one who pronounces Jack as captain of the Black Pearl in the film's final scene — and that's the last we saw of her. Sequel "Dead Man's Chest" got most of the original cast back (Geoffrey Rush's Captain Barbossa even returned from the dead), but not Saldaña. Why?

Saldaña has said several times that she did not enjoy making "Pirates of the Caribbean" and so she was uninterested in going through that experience again. Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2014, she explained:

"Those weren't the right people for me [on the 'Pirates' set]. I'm not talking about the cast. The cast was great. I'm talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors. It was a lot of above-the-line versus below-the-line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs. It was very elitist. I almost quit the business. I was 23 years old, and I was like, "F— this!" I am never putting myself in this situation again. People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I'm not important. F— you."

She recently credited her next movie, Steven Spielberg's 2004 comedy "The Terminal," as the experience that convinced her not to quit Hollywood. "If the studio and the producers and the director, they're not leading with kindness and awareness and consideration, then that big of a production can become a really bad experience and you may tip overboard. And I kind of did," Saldaña explained to Variety. "I worked with Steven Spielberg eight months later, and he restored my faith that big can also be great."

Saldaña hasn't changed her opinion in the 10 years since that Hollywood Reporter interview, but in more recent ones, she seems a little more measured talking about "Pirates." In a 2022 interview with Entertainment Weekly, she put less emphasis on the "elitist" atmosphere and more on it being a set with lots of moving pieces, where an inexperienced actor like her struggled to keep up.

"It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members. We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days. I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast."

One reason for Saldaña's anger cooling might be because "Pirates" producer Jerry Bruckheimer reached out to her and apologized for her negative experience. Saldaña said (in a BBC interview) that Bruckheimer's apology "felt really quite honorable" to her. In a Buzzfeed UK interview, she spoke even more fondly about "Curse of the Black Pearl" — "What a great movie. It was all around such a diverse cast as well, all ages, all walks of life, but a hard production. It was just so big! It was too big of a machine for me, and it was too out of control."

Saldaña was, again, the only "Pirates" star so put off by the shoot that she didn't return. That said, other accounts support her claims that it was a chaotic set. The film was shot over five months (October 2002 to March 2003) between sets in Los Angeles and on location in the Caribbean island country Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Michael Eisner, the then CEO of Disney, did not have faith in the project either, so that meant inconsistent support from up top.

Speaking to Collider in 2021, "Pirates" director Gore Verbinski indicated that the chaos only increased during the simultaneous shoots of "Dead Man's Chest" and "At World's End."

"After ['Curse of the Black Pearl'] was successful, 'Pirates 2' and '3 start' to fall into the 'release date-driven experience'. There's a calendar and dates and "we need two more of these babies. How soon can you do it?" So you don't have scripts and you're making a movie to a release date."

If Saldaña couldn't stand how "big" the first "Pirates" shoot was, I can't imagine she would've been happy shooting the second and third. I am happy, though, that she stuck around in Hollywood despite the bad first impression.