Zoe Saldana Shares Her Emotional Connection To Maya and the Three

Zoe Saldana voices sassy Maya in the new Netflix limited series Maya and the Three — in this interview she shares her emotional connection with it.

In celebration of the amazing, inspiring, and all around fun new Netflix limited series, Maya and the Three, we participated in an interview with the incredibly talented Zoe Saldana. She brings the sassy yet humble Maya to life in this series, and has an emotional connection to the series for several reasons.

In this interview she talks about how important inclusion and representation is, how fun it was to voice Maya, and what she hopes that children and families take away from this series. It is very clear just how much she loves Maya and the Three. 

Related: 50+ Inspiring Maya and the Three Quotes

What similarities do you have to Maya?

I remember what it was like to know who I was and know what I wanted to do. And I remember my mom, my dad, and my grandma always wanting me to be what they thought that I should do. It’s such a universal thing. Me being really radical and very rebellious about that. I remember being 15 and thinking that it’s the end of the world. It was just refreshing to get to revisit those emotions. 

What do you hope audiences take away from Maya and the Three?

I feel like the biggest takeaway are a couple in this story.

To have a female heroine at the helm of a beautiful, adventurous, aesthetically amazing epic story, it’s “More, please.” You know, like we need that. That representation does matter. It is primordial. It is essential to the building of a person’s identity, to the building of someone’s character, not just of one singular person but also of a community and then eventually of a nation. I think that’s so important now.

What I like about the way that Jorge Gutierrez and Sandra do it is that they come from a place of love and celebration rather than from a place of social justice. So, all of these nuances of Mesoamerican cultures and Caribbean cultural tones are just an icing on a cake.

That is all about family and love and loss and action and friendship and identity, not just of cultural identity but also gender identity. But it’s done in a very subtle but also very mature way, and his main audience are young people.

Everything about the way Jorge is creating sort of a career for himself lets you know that his talent is undeniable, but also, like, his heart is really big. 

What made you want to be a part of Maya and the Three?

Jorge Gutierrez. When I worked with him on Book of Life, I had such a wonderful experience. I was in awe of him. I was starving for creatives like him where we share our Latinx sort of like heritage.

What else? What else? I like the fact that his animation is very authentic, very original. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen before. Everything about it is wonderful.

On the red carpet of Book of Life he asked me that if he invited me to another adventure, would I join him, and I said absolutely yes. I didn’t think he was going to keep his promise, and he did. And so, of course I kept mine and I willingly, with my open heart, did it, and I was really honored and excited.

Getting to work with him again was fun, but it is exhausting because you can’t, no matter how much you try, match Jorge’s energy when you’re in a session with him, because he gives 110% on everything. He’s all in at all times. He’s all in. And that is a challenge, that if you accept, you learn to have just as much fun as Jorge, but that means that by the time you finish your session, you’re exhausted.

You’ll get to see it because Maya is loud and she’s proud and she’s feisty and she’s in your face. You know what I mean? And she makes these mistakes out loud. And I feel like everything about Maya is undeniably female and all woman.

I really feel that Jorge captured what a woman is, in a girl’s form, because he really wanted to celebrate the women in his life that mean so much to him, that raise him every day. And so, obviously I wanted to make him proud.

What do you look for in a role?

Before I became a mom I looked for roles that, ever since I was a child, I was just curious and really passionate about. My idols were Whoopi Goldberg, Sigourney Weaver, and Linda Hamilton, and I would watch their movies over and over again. I did not want to be the princess. I wanted to be the queen. I wanted to be the warrior, but I want to do it in space and I wanted to fight aliens.

These were all the games that I played, and it would feel really lonely and very disheartening when I was sometimes reminded that I needed to be something else, that I was not okay having these urges and these desires. Becoming an actor, I was always leading with my heart. I was raised to just lead life with my heart.

So, when films like Star Trek and filmmakers like J.J. Abrams and James Cameron for Avatar approach me and they invite me to be a part of their world — their world is the funnest world in the world. You know what I mean? I worked with Steven Spielberg, with all these people that gave themselves the permission to imagine the unimaginable. And here they were, looking at this little girl from Queens, and I fit in that world for them.

That is what gave me that affirmation that who I am and what I like in life means something. People of my likeness will see it.

I guess now that I’m a mother, my goal is to continue doing that, but to add representation to that because I also know what it was like to be invisible, not just by gender but also culturally invisible in a land where my Pledge of Allegiance was inclusive, but I’ve felt excluded many, many times.

I felt like I always had to work twice as hard to just get the okay from something sometimes. And you sort of go, “I don’t want my kids to be exhausted by the time they’re teenagers because they always have to work twice as hard to be seen and heard.”

I guess that I can be a part of change, like singular little me, by just knowing and curating the art that I’m a part of and the stories that I get to tell so that, when they look at them, they kind of go my mom did really live by that word and that craft and that path, and I am somebody because my mom told me to. I feel like that’s important.

What does Maya’s quote “If it is to be, it is up to me.” mean to you?

I found myself getting emotional as we kept going through episode after episode and I was witnessing her journey. This show is not–it’s not light. It’s going to go there on all these emotions and all these peaks and valleys of life.

I was living a parallel life with Maya where she’s just saying it and not believing in it. But challenge after challenge, after she survives that challenge and now she’s faced with another one, and how that phrase just would take a deeper and deeper meaning for her, it was also becoming very deep for me.

There were moments in which Jorge and I were getting choked up. And I know it’s hard to say that. “Oh, my God, really? You got choked up just voicing an animation,” but you really do. You get involved, and especially when a story is so well written, so well fleshed out, when it comes to a human being’s emotional journey into not just finding themselves, but also accepting so many things of themselves, you know? It’s a very powerful phrase.

What do you hope indigenous children will take away from your character?

That they are beautiful and that they are meant to be. I get emotional because it’s important for children of color to know that they matter, that their stories matter, that their history matters, and that nobody has to give you that anymore. It’s yours. It’s always been yours.

I think it’s up to us–we also have a lot of power. I feel like a lot of time is spent sometimes pointing the finger and not enough time is spent investing on our communities ourselves, like on our education, uplifting each other so that once we rise to these positions of leadership, then we become those gatekeepers. And we are in that journey.

America is about to witness a beautiful renaissance, and obviously that takes time, unfortunately. But we’re on it already. We’re on it and we just have to stay the course.

Your job as journalists and mothers as well is to hold everybody accountable. You all have to watch this. It is on us. We have to. Your time and your money is the power and the validation that we give to all the content that blatantly omits us from their narrative. We are the ones that have perpetuated this. Please understand that when it comes to studios, they’re not just the bad cops. We have been the bad cops as well.

But when you say you will no longer take my time, you will no longer take my money, I don’t have to watch you ’cause I’m going to spend all of who I am promoting and amplifying and growing this community, this visibility, that’s when all the studios and all those executives are going to be like, “Oh, we gotta chase the money where it’s going.” It’s we have to be pragmatic about this.

They’re just giving us what we’re giving back to them. Take it away, and you’ll see how the narrative immediately in America changes. We are a nation of capitalism. You don’t hit them in the heart. You hit them in the pocket.

What makes you so emotionally tied to this story?

I allow myself to cry over anything that moves me and everything that moves me. That said, I will not take away the value and the impact that working with Jorge has had on me once again, but also us being able to, in a very beautiful way, have the opportunity with a platform like Netflix to share our heritage is fun. It’s exciting.

It’s like once you remove all the heaviness of social justice as well. I know that we all wake up so responsible and so charged every day because our children depend on it. But also, our culture is beautiful. Our culture is rich and it is old as F. It is thousands of years old.

So, for us to unearth it, all of our mythologies and our folklore, and just do it in a way that we’re just dressing our history. We’re dressing these universal themes of life and love and loss and friendship. We’re just dressing that with our history, our heritage. But in reality, this is universal.

What I want is for everybody to feel happy and to share. Please share who you are, even if it’s just one person that’s listening. That’s enough. Share who you are. Be proud of who you are.

How would you describe Maya?

She is sassy. She is independent. She is very wholesome. Even at 15, she knows who she is. And I just love that about people. Every now and then you meet people at whatever age, even when they’re, like, six months old and you’re like, “You know who you are. You know exactly who you are.” Their personality is just there, you know?

That’s exactly how Jorge wanted her, and I think that she is a combination of all these women, these female heroines in Jorge’s live, from his mom and his wife and his sister. And he definitely wanted me to make her be bold and beautiful and just rebellious.

I remember that wasn’t the way that he described it. He was just like, “I want you to be her.” I’m like, “Well, what do you mean?” “Do you want this?” “Yes, I want Zoe.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.”

That made me think. “Oh, how am I”? Like, how do people really see me? You know what I mean? Maybe it’s a cultural thing, we Latinas, we always come super hard. And I feel like Maya is going to be that person.

What I love the most about Maya, the way that Jorge really wanted her to be like, when she was wrong, she was wrong. There’s something really wholesome about her. And when I say wholesome, I don’t mean just I think that makes her perfectly her.

It’s also everything that makes her perfectly flawed. And because of that she needs rescuing from her friends. She needs to be told from her friends how she needs to be a better person. And I love the fact that he gave her so much humility of character to acknowledge when she was wrong.

Related: Zoe Saldana Shares Tips on Marriage, Fitness, & Empowering Women

About Maya and the Three

In a fantastical world, where magic turns the world and four kingdoms rule the lands, a brave and rebellious warrior princess named Maya is about to celebrate her fifteenth birthday and coronation. But everything changes when the gods of the underworld arrive and announce that Maya’s life is forfeit to the God of War — a price she must pay for her family’s secret past.

If Maya refuses, the whole world will suffer the gods’ vengeance. To save her beloved family, her friends, and her own life, Maya embarks on a thrilling quest to fulfill an ancient prophecy that foretells the coming of three great warriors who will help her defeat the gods and save humankind.

Maya and the Three premieres globally on Netflix October 22, 2021.