Zoe Saldaña reveals she got an important apology from producer Jerry Bruckheimer after detailing the bad experience she had on “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” many years ago.
“It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members,” the “Avatar” actor told Entertainment Weekly on Tuesday, of her work on the 2003 film.
“We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days,” she explained. “I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast.”
The “From Scratch” star said she didn’t have “a good experience” overall and felt “lost in the trenches.”
“And I just didn’t feel like that was okay,” Saldaña said. “Years later, I was able to meet with Jerry Bruckheimer, who apologized that I had that experience cause he really wants everyone to have a good experience on his projects.”
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“That really moved me — the fact that he remembered that I had mentioned that,” she said, “and that he felt compelled to bring it up and to take accountability.”
Saldaña explained in detail the problems she had on the first “Pirates” film set in a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, saying “those weren’t the right people for me.”
“I’m not talking about the cast. The cast was great,” she said. “I’m talking about the political stuff that went on behind closed doors. It was a lot of above-the-line versus below-the-line, extras versus actors, producers versus PAs.”
The actor said that “it was very elitist,” to the point that she “almost quit the business.”
“I was 23 years old, and I was like, ‘F— this!’ I am never putting myself in this situation again,” she said. “People disrespecting me because they look at my number on a call sheet and they think I’m not important. F— you.”