A box office juggernaut that nearly forced Zoe Saldana to quit acting

Saldaña is not has changed her opinion in the 10 years since that Hollywood Reporter interview, but lately, she seems a little more measured when talking about “Pirates.” U 2022 Entertainment Weekly interviewshe emphasized less on the “elitist” atmosphere and more on the fact that it was a set with a lot of moving parts where an inexperienced actor like herself would struggle to keep up.

“It was my first encounter with a major Hollywood mega-film where there were as many actors as there were producers and as many crew members. We shot in different locations and sometimes the environment was not so pleasant for our shooting. I was very young and it was too big for me and the pace was too fast.”

Part of the reason Saldana’s anger has cooled may be that “Pirates” producer Jerry Bruckheimer reached out to her and apologized for her negative experience. Saldaña said (in an interview with the BBC), that Bruckheimer’s apology “was very honorable for her”. In an interview with Buzzfeed UK, she spoke even more tenderly of The Curse of the Black Pearl — “What a great movie. It also had such a diverse cast, all ages, all walks of life, but a difficult production. It was just so massive! It was too big a car for me and too out of control.’

Then again, Saldaña was the only Pirates star who was so put off by filming that she didn’t return. However, other accounts support her claims that it was a chaotic set. The film was shot over five months (October 2002 to March 2003) between locations in Los Angeles and the Caribbean island nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Michael Eisner, Disney’s CEO at the time, also didn’t believe in the project, so that meant inconsistent support from the top.

Speaking to Collider in 2021, The director of “Pirates” Gor Verbinski noted that there is only chaos increased during the simultaneous shooting of the films “Dead Man’s Chest” and “At the Edge of the World”.

“After the success of (The Curse of the Black Pearl”), Pirates 2 and 3 are starting to enter a ‘release date dependent experience.’ There’s a calendar and dates and “we need two more kids like that.” How soon can you do it?’ So you have no scripts and you’re making the movie before the release date.”

If Saldaña hadn’t endured how “big” the first Pirates movie was, I can’t imagine she would have been happy doing the second and third. i I’m happy, though, that she stuck with Hollywood despite her bad first impression.