Zoe Saldana is very happy with the way her career looks now, but there was a time when she was so exhausted from being so in demand that she would have traded in her celebrity and acting talents for a much less stressful gig of resting. As a means of promoting her new film, Colombiana, Zoe sat down with Latina Magazine and talked about how hard her life was one year after filming Avatar (which is largely considered the film that launched her into the A-list stratosphere), and commented on how her stress levels remained high even while she was shooting Colombiana. She said, “The year after Avatar was just emotionally overwhelming. I was traveling all over the world, waking up in different time zones. Your body gets exhausted, and by the end of the year I just collapsed.” On how her exhaustion carried over and affected her time in Paris on the set of Colombiana, she said “I was sitting in my hotel room, and I couldn’t stop crying. I couldn’t stay awake. I must have slept for an entire month.”
So why accept more roles right after filming the highest grossing movie of all time if she was so tired? Zoe explained that she has this desire to have the most renowned directors in the world tell her she’s talented. She said “I just want the best filmmakers in the world to tell me, ‘You’re good, kid, you’re legit.’ The recognition will never get old, and I’ll never get accustomed to it. I don’t ever want to, because that will mean I’m taking it for granted. That’s why I work, not for the luxuries or the awards.” But now that she has more time to herself, Zoe is quite proud of how she’s found a new way to spend her time (when she’s not making movies): “I just stay at home and do absolutely nothing,” she said. “When I was younger, that would have made me feel like such a failure. Now that I’m older, I know what it means to shut down. I don’t shower if I don’t want to. I don’t answer e-mails. It’s a healthy way of being selfish. You know you’re old when gardening, the Food Network and voice notes from your nieces and nephews blow your mind.”
Source: Latina Magazine
