Zoe Saldana Talks Star Trek

6 months ago 06th May 10:36

This week J.J. Abrams' Star Trek blasts onto cinema screens as he takes the franchise right back to the beginning with a new, and young crew. Zoe Saldana takes on the role of Uhura who, along with the rest of the crew embark on their first Enterprise mission.

For those people who’ve never seen star trek, introduce your character Uhura. who is she and why is she on this ship?

Well, she’s a very important tool on the ship. She’s a translator. They’re traveling to all different kinds of galaxies and planets. So she’s an expert in linguistics. She’s able to translate and be sort of like the operator or the mediator between two commanders of two different ships from two different planets trying to meet in common so they can have safe passages.

That’s a very important thing. If she gets it wrong, she can actually start a war between two nations or something. And she’s very stoic. She’s very strong. And loves what she does. And sort of takes herself a little too seriously sometimes.
 
I don’t know how many of these other languages you’re going to speak, but were there challenges for you linguistically? Is there a romulan language that you had to learn?

No, no (laugh). For me, it was actually learning to speak as fast as JJ wanted us to speak because we’re saying a lot of important things. There are a lot of big words like: 'The trajectory for the USS Enterprise' And you’re just like ;Brrrrrrrrrrrr' And you’re talking so fast.

And JJ is known to speak really, really fast. So he would always say in-between takes, 'Zoe that was excellent, now, next take, ten times faster.' And you’re like, 'I can’t believe it.' And you’re dialogue is like this long. So that was the linguistics challenge that I had (laughs).
 
You think in the future that society would be a little more progressive and that there would be a lot more women on board or in positions of power. Was that something interesting to you or questioning? How far have we progressed in how many hundreds of years?

No, there were many women. I didn’t look at that issue though because for some reason I automatically assumed that in the future these things would not be an issue. Maybe there were just more men per capita then women, and that’s why they were there in the flight school. I don’t know.
 
What about the mythology of ‘Star Trek’? in a lot of instances it really was pertaining to social and political themes of its time without coming out and saying we’re talking about this or that. They could use outer space metaphors, to make it easier for people to transition into it.

I think it was sort of like a poetic justice at that time. For these dreamers, which is what I believe that Gene Roddenberry was, he had this vision of what he wanted to see, as an artist, as an audience member. And he never backed down.

I guess when he kept getting turned down and they said, 'The only way we would do this is if it was many years into the future and in space,' he was like, OK, fine. So if that’s what I have to do in order for me to show the kind of world that I would like us to be in, then I’ll do that. And I thought it was so compassionate and so beautiful and so ahead of its time.
 
Were you happy to immerse yourself in the culture of ‘Star Trek’ after you got this part? What was that process like? Was there a Star Trek bible?

No. It was extensive conversations with JJ. And he had some advisors on the set that were ‘Star Trek’ advisors. I wanted to see as little as possible of the series. I was afraid of entering into a crack of mimicking the actors that were portraying these characters as opposed to just studying the characters.