‘I wish I could go back in time’: Zoe Saldaña reveals the surprising experience she had working on James Gunn’s ‘Guardians’ trilogy

Zoe Saldaña has reflected on the unique experience she had while portraying Gamora in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise while thwarting the idea that Marvel movies can’t be deep. 

The actress recalled her time working on the trilogy in a recent interview with Variety, revealing that James Gunn — who directed all installments of the space-going superhero franchise — offered her the role after seeing her play Neytiri in Avatar. “I wish I could go back in time and try so many more things for [Gamora],” Saldaña said. 

“She was a really fun character to play.” Beyond the fact that Gamora solidified Saldaña’s status as the go-to actress for alien characters (look out, out Mike Wazowski!), the role offered a level of depth that took Saldaña by surprise, since “we don’t like to use words like ‘deep’ and ‘Marvel’ in the same sentence.”

Similar criticisms of Marvel movies supposedly lacking nuance have in the past been leveled against the studio by the likes of Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Oliver Stone, but Saldaña said it was James Gunn who brought much of the unexpected depth to the Guardians franchise. “He was doing something really special,” Saldaña said of the now-DCU mastermind. 

“He was stepping outside of the mold of what superheroes were supposed to be.” The actress went on to describe the rag-tag team that comprises Guardians as “rejects that came with childhood traumas and disabilities and mental issues.” According to Saldaña, this more complex idea of a superhero — beyond just your regular cape-wearer who saves cats from tall trees — meant Gunn “gave these characters space to be loved.”

“It was a really important film now that I look back at it,” she added, citing the Guardians characters’ discovery of self-love and their creation of a “family within their friendships.” It isn’t the first time Saldaña has looked back fondly on her experience working on the trilogy, with the actress last year praising the conclusion of Gamora’s character arc and leaving the door open for a possible reprisal of the role. 

Elsewhere, Saldaña said she loved the anonymity that CGI-heavy characters like Gamora and Neytiri provided her, since she can sometimes go unrecognized in public (unless, of course, she ducks out for dinner while covered entirely in green paint).

Saldaña isn’t the only celebrity who has vouched for the surprising depth of Marvel movies and defended them as valid pieces of cinema. Fellow Marvel stars like Chris Hemsworth, Chris Hemsworth, and Samuel L. Jackson have each hit back at criticisms of the superhero genre in the past (I’m sure the enormous paycheck didn’t hurt), with web-slinger Tom Holland going as far as describing Marvel movies as “real art.”

Still, the critiques Saldaña mentions persist. Scorsese famously described Marvel movies as “not real cinema”, while Coppola and Stone echoed the sentiment and labeled them as “despicable” and “not believable,” respectively (ouch!). How about we all just get off our high horses and enjoy a bunch of super-powered characters shooting lasers and rescuing kittens? With a bucket full of popcorn, no movie needs to be “deep” to be enjoyable, and I’ll die on that hill (with buttery fingers and kernels in my teeth).