Zoe Saldana Says Men Get the Perks, While Studios Won’t Pay Her Daycare

Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Spike TV/AFP
Kevin Winter/Getty Images for Spike TV/AFP

Newlywed actress Zoe Saldana says motherhood can be a challenge when you’re a star, because while major studios are shuffling the men around the world on jets, the ladies are still struggling to get a little help with daycare.

Saldana, 36, spoke to USA TODAY Tuesday about her upcoming independent film Infinitely Polar Bear, starring alongside Mark Ruffalo, and discussed the dynamics of balancing children with her ascending career.

“Let me tell you something, it will never be the right time for anybody in your life that you get pregnant,” she told the paper of conceiving twin boys, before explaining that at one time she felt one of her scheduled projects had been put in jeopardy over the sudden lifestyle change.

While Hollywood’s men enjoy the perks of landing major roles, Saldana says women face a different reality.

Studios “spend more money sometimes ‘perking’ up male superstars in a movie,” she said, including booking private jets, and paying for assistants and bodyguards or booking “a really phat penthouse or them staying in a yacht instead of them staying on land.”

The star then said:

But then a woman comes in going, ‘OK, I have a child. You’re taking me away from my home. You’re taking my children away from their home. And you’re going to make me work a lot more hours than I usually would if I was home. Therefore, I would have to pay for this nanny for more hours — so I kind of need that. And they go, ‘Nope, we don’t pay for nannies.’

“Right when I just feel super-duper happy, is that inconvenient for you?” she jokingly addressed studios. “That me, as a woman in my thirties, I finally am in love and I am finally starting my life? And it’s (screwing) your schedule up? Really?”

Saldana revealed in the July 2015 issue of InTouch magazine that her husband, Italian artist Marco Perego, took her last name after their secret wedding in 2013.

“I tried to talk him out of it,” she said. “I told him, ‘If you use my name, you’re going to be emasculated by your community of artists, by your Latin community of men, by the world.’”

She added: “Marco looks up at me and says, ‘Ah, Zoe, I don’t give a s–t.’”

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