When Zoe Saldaña, at nine years old, began her new life in the Dominican Republic, she felt lost. Her father had just died, her mother stayed back in the United States to support her and her sisters, and she didn’t speak enough Spanish to get by. On top of that, she didn’t retain information quite like the other kids, as she suffered from the now-common conditions ADHD and dyslexia, which can cause learning difficulties, especially in reading and writing.
Saldaña remembers those days clearly, and, she tells Harper’s Bazaar in her new cover story, she also remembers what saved her: art.
“I was always off,” the Emilia Pérez star recalls. “When you have a child that has ADHD and is dyslexic and has a lot of energy and doesn’t sit still and is unable to listen, you think that it’s on purpose. I just remember asking myself, ‘Why don’t I fit in? Why do I do this?’ It would make me really sad, and it would make me feel really isolated.”
Eventually, Saldaña and her younger sister, Cisely, competed against 600 other girls for spots in one of the Dominican Republic’a dance academies. “Thank God for that. Ballet, at that time, wasn’t what I specifically wanted,” Saldaña says, explaining that she had wanted to be a gymnast, but found it was too late for her, at 10, to begin competitive training. Ballet, though, “was exactly what I needed to settle my restless mind,” she says.
Saldaña continued her dance training, which led to theater (she went on to involve herself in theater groups such as Faces and the New York Youth Theatre), which led to TV and film acting—which led to a Golden Globe.
Still, she says her conditions have sometimes informed how she behaves as an adult. Speaking to Bazaar of her current role on Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness—where she plays the spymaster of a ring of female CIA counterterrorism operatives—Saldaña, who is a breezy, free spirit, says she turned down the role because it didn’t feel like she could do it.
She was coming to terms with her lifelong “restlessness,” she explains, and beginning to understand how her ADHD and dyslexia have led her actions throughout her life. “I didn’t feel that I was cut out for it. I was convinced that I was going to fail,” she says.
The actor turned down the offer, and an entire year later, having been unable to stop thinking about it, she called Sheridan back. “He responded immediately, and he was like, ‘We’re fucking waiting on you,’” Saldaña recalls.
Read the full cover story here.
