Interview: Zoe Saldaña On Her Award-Winning Performance and Role as Rita in ‘Emilia Pérez’ and Working with Madonna’s Choreographer [VIDEO]

At a recent press stop in Los Angeles, I talked with Zoe Saldaña about her role and performance in Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which won her and co-stars Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez and Adriana Paz a rare group Best Actress win at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival.

Saldaña recalls watching the win being announced on a livestream (she was filming season two of Paramount+’s Lioness in Texas at the time) and tears up thinking about that moment. “Never in a million years… were we expecting the jury in Cannes this year to see us as a band of women, telling a much stronger story of a journey towards freedom,” she says. “My first thought was to call Selena!” She goes on to talk about how Rita tapped into elements of her life that has previously felt dormant like singing and speaking Spanish, dancing and more. “Once a dancer, always a dancer,” she says, (Center Stage fans will be happy) “you miss the piano, you miss the smell of that wooden floor,” she continues.

We talk about her showstopping number “El Mal” in the film, choreographed by Madonna “Celebration Tour” choreographer Damien Jalet, who she says “makes it seem like you’re just playing in a sandbox.” She continued, saying, “He believed in me in times when I really didn’t believe in myself, as I was reconnecting with my body.”

Emilia Pérez is currently in select theaters and will be available on Netflix November 13.

Video editing by Griffin Schiller

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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