A grateful Zoe Saldana was moved with sentiment when accepting the Golden Globe Award for Best Female Supporting Actor In Any Motion Picture for her performance in the French film, Emilia Perez. This award was the film’s first win to be announced during the 5 January evening awards ceremony.
With tears and choked by emotion, 46-year old Saldana gave credit to the team at Emilia Perez and her fellow nominees Ariana Grande In Wicked, Felicity Jones in The Brutalist, Margarett Qualley in The Substance, Isabella Rosselini in Conclave and Selena Gomez in Emilia Perez.
Before thanking her cast and crew, Saldaña gave a shout out to her fellow nominees. “I am so grateful,” she exclaimed fighting back tears. “I know this is competition but all that I have witnessed is of us showing up for each other and it’s just so beautiful.”
As reported, after thanking all her cast and crew, Saldana recognized her director Jacques Audiard for not only creating her incredible character but for how he is as an individual as well. “Thank you for trusting me,” she told the director. “You are just a character that I admire so much, you create rich and complex characters and you’re also so French and chic and confident and kind.”
Emilia Perez had received 10 nominations and won four awards. The French film, directed by Jacques Audiard, won in the following categories:
Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy
Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language
Best Supporting Actress – Zoe Saldaña
Best Original Song – El Mal
The film is available on Netflix and can be seen in the Dominican Republic. It is a pop musical, comedy, drama, crime, thriller that takes place mostly in Mexico. It was released in November 2024 and has an IMDB rating of 6.8/10.
Officially billed as “an audacious fever dream that defies genres and expectations,” the movie centers on “fearsome cartel leader Emilia [who] enlists Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an unappreciated lawyer stuck in a dead-end job, to help fake her death so that Emilia can finally live authentically as her true self.”
While it would appear to be a frank denunciation of drug trafficking and corruption in Mexico, the plot of Emilia Perez is not based on a true story. Director Jacques Audiard, who co-wrote the film, said the idea came to him while reading the 2018 French novel Écoute by Boris Razon. “Halfway through, there is a character who is a drug kingpin who wants to transition to become a woman,” he told W Magazine in an interview.
Zoe Yadira Saldaña Nazario was born in New Jersey, USA of a Dominican father and Puerto Rican mother. She celebrates the Dominican part of her as she spent her teenage years in the Dominican Republic where she got her first ballet and artistic training. Her career took off in 2000 with her stellar performance in “Center Stage.” She has starred in four of the highest-grossing films of all time (Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame). The films she has appeared in have grossed more than US$15 billion worldwide and, as of 2024, she is the second highest-grossing lead actress and the highest-grossing actress overall. Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.
President Luis Abinader sent her his congratulations by the X platform.
Read more:
Euronews
Deadline
People
IMDB Emilia Perez
Hello Magazine
Wikipedia
Diario Libre
Diario Libre
El Dia
President Abinader X
7 January 2025