Zoe Saldana Reveals Post-Avatar Meltdown: Will She Still Do the Sequels?

Actress admits tough times after making and promoting James Cameron's hit blue-skinned flick. Was it worth it?

By Marc Malkin Aug 09, 2011 10:45 PMTags
Avatar, Zoe SaldanaTwentieth Century Fox

Avatar may have left Zoe Saldana mentally and physically spent, but that's not stopping her from going blue again.

"The year after Avatar  was just emotionally overwhelming," she says in the new issue of Latina magazine (out Aug. 16). "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."

Things got worse before they got better...

"I was in Paris training for Colombiana, sitting in my hotel room, and I couldn't stop crying," she said. "I couldn't stay awake. I must have slept for an entire month. It took me the rest of the year, even as I was working and shooting Colombiana, to pick myself up. Thank God my family was there."

Even so, Saldana tells me she's ready to start working with director James Cameron on his next two Avatar flicks. "I think it's happening next year, but we don't know exactly when," she said at the Teen Choice Awards. "The one thing I do know is that Jim will not greenlight anything unless he's absolutely OK and proud of the script he's putting together. That said, we just have to trust the man, that he will deliver."

As for Colombiana (in theaters Aug. 26), Saldana plays a woman who becomes an assassin after seeing her parents murdered when she was a child.

"There aren't enough action movies that don't just show women sexually or compromise the level and intensity of the violence," she said. "I wanted to play a character that was androgynous. This could have been a boy. This could have been a man and it still would have been just as raw and just as violent."

Go, Zoe!