Action veteran Zoe Saldana isn’t pulling any punches when describing the sexism she’s faced in Hollywood over the years.
“A producer once told me he hired me for the way I held a gun while wearing panties, not for my opinions,” she told the Philadelphia Daily News in a recent interview promoting her new film, “Infinitely Polar Bear.”
“I wish I’d recorded it, so I could play it for every girl in elementary school and tell them never to let anybody treat them that way. “
Though Saldana stopped short of naming the offending producer, she’s had to battle almost in the buff in a pair of action movies, “The Losers” (2010) and “Colombiana” (2011).
The trip down bad memory lane comes a month after the 37-year-old actress lamented to USA Today that several productions she had been set to work on panicked when news broke about her pregnancy.
“I heard through the grapevine there was even a conversation of me being written off of one of the projects,” she told the newspaper.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, are you kidding me? It’s this bad?’ Right when I just feel super-duper happy, is that inconvenient for you?'”
Fortunately, her director on the upcoming “Avatar” sequels didn’t seem concerned at the time.
“The beauty of doing the performance capture is that she can be as big as a house and it doesn’t really matter,” Cameron quipped to the New York Daily News last August, four months before Saldana and husband Marco Perego welcomed their twin sons.
‘”Because we’re not photographing her, we’re ‘capturing’ her. She might have some physical limitations running around through the jungle, but we can get around all that stuff.”
That proved to be irrelevant anyway, because the start of filming was pushed to this year.
