Zoë Saldaña has shared a long-felt frustration over her name.
The 46-year-old actress, who has Dominican and Puerto Rican heritage and was born in Passaic, New Jersey, says American officials left the accents on her surname off of her birth certificate in what she claims was an act of “entitlement”.
Adding a tilde to an “n” changes the hard closed sound to a “ny” in Saldaña’s last name. This has led to many people misprouncing it over the years and she didn’t try to correct them.
Speaking to Jessie and Lennie Ware on their Table Manners podcast, Saldaña - who is up for a Best Supporting Actress award at next month’s Oscars - said: “I think that back in the day it was an entitlement of ‘well, this is America, this is English, that doesn’t exist, so we’re not gonna put it in’.
“Versus now – there’s this mindfulness of ‘how do you want to be called? What is your name?’ And that I truly appreciate,” she continued.
“That gave me permission to make that choice, come into that awareness of ‘wait a minute, this is not my full name. My full name is Zoë Saldaña, and it’s no longer my job to help you pronounce my name.
“But it’s also my job not to take it personally if you can’t,” she added.
Her latest remarks come after she found herself caught up in the controversy swirling around her Emilia Pérez co-star Karla Sofia Gascon over social media posts.
Spanish actress Gascon, who plays the titular role in the acclaimed film, has apologised after facing a backlash over resurfaced social media posts shared between 2019 and 2021 that included Islamophobic rhetoric and offensive comments about George Floyd.
While collecting the Best Supporting Actress at the 2025 London Critics' Circle Awards earlier this month, Saldaña asked people to be "abstract with your idea of redemption".
