avatar star Zoe Saldana says the audition process for the 2009 blockbuster was surreal. Saldaña, who reprises her role as Na’vi heroine Neytiri in the upcoming sequel Avatar: the way of the watertold about her strange experience of auditioning for the first movie While appear on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. The actress, 44, shared that the Alita: Battle Angel-like character descriptions she had been given made her unsure about the role, but she decided to go ahead with the audition process anyway.
“I was still living in New York at the time and they were going to put me on tape,” Saldaña said, recounting the various seemingly random jobs she was asked to do by casting directors Mali Finn and Margery Simkin. “Sometimes it was like ‘Bring some tight stuff, I want you to climb and do some cartwheels.’ And I’m like, “Okay.” So I’d come in, it’s like, “We’ll, we’ll just play. Let’s move some furniture.”
“I feel like I was able to book the part because of [my dance background]. Then one time they called me and put myself back on tape for them, and they said, ‘Just make all these noises,'” the star continued, rolling her Rs flawlessly. a robot warrior princess who is in the jungle, and I… roll my Rs, I don’t know what this is, but I dig it.
Saldaña talks about first meeting with Cameron: ‘I have an out-of-body experience’
While Saldaña may not have understood all the hoops she jumped through on her audition tapes, the actress performed well enough to be flown to Los Angeles to meet director James Cameron. Once she arrived, things somehow got even more surreal as she flipped through the two-inch-thick script.
“They locked me in an office, which was a little, a little scary, and they gave me the script… They gave me three hours to read it, it took me six. The world of Pandora was real to me bizarre. English is not my first language, so that was a bit difficult,” she recalls.
But the most unnerving moment of all? Meeting Cameron, who called Saldaña her “idol,” and seeing the iconic movie props casually displayed in his office.
“Then Jim came in and he was so nice. He said, ‘Are you ready to meet yourself?’ And I was like ‘what?’ At that moment, my soul, as it were, left my body. Then he walks with me to his office, I see this big [steering] wheel of a ship, I had no idea it was the Titanic wheel. I see the arm of the terminator. I was just like, oh my god, I’m having an out-of-body experience,” she said, pointing out another soon-to-be-iconic prop in their presence.
“On the coffee table was a sculpture of my character, Neytiri. As I look at the sculpture, he sits in front of me as if observing me. And I think, ‘that’s not weird, that’s not weird, don’t act weird.'”
As weird as the audition process was, Saldaña was offered the role a few weeks later; avatar would become the highest-grossing film of all time.
With Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang and Kate Winslet, Avatar: the way of the water will be in cinemas from December 16.