Zoe Saldana admits her husband "irritated the f*** out of me" on one of the first times they met. The Emilia Perez star won the best supporting actress award at the BAFTAs and thanked her husband among many others in a sweary acceptance speech. She met her husband, Marco Perego-Saldana, at a yacht party in Cannes in the early 2010s. But it would not be until 2013 that they crossed paths again — inside a cross-country flight from Los Angeles to New York.
On that chance encounter, Zoe explained to the Table Manners podcast how her tough New York personality was at odds with Marco's "gentle" but "confident" Italian charm. She revealed: "He made the first move. Italians are so confident. They're like, 'Cara mia, muah, muah', all that thing. And I'm from New York, I'm like, 'Stop! Yes. Use your voice. Use your manly voice!' Because my husband's really gentle and he's like, 'Ciao, amore'.
"I'm like, 'Talk, like, grounded'. And he's always like, 'Don't be unkind to me. Okay, I'll speak to you like this'. So I was always very, very hard. But maybe that's what he liked about me. I don't know.". Zoe then explained how the rest of her in-flight romance with Marco blossomed, saying they would not have met had it not been for some encouragement from her make-up artist. "I was traveling with my make-up artist, who's from Argentina," she revealed. "She said 'Oh my God! Come quick! There's an Adonis on the parallel queue to us! Come quick before he leaves!'.
"As I'm walking towards her, she does this thing and then goes like this. So then my eyes look at her and go exactly where she's staring at. And he's [Marco] right there parallel to her on the neighboring queue. And something told me, like I just heard this voice. I was like, 'What the f*** was that? You love him'.". She continued: "I just heard like my voice within me that said, 'You love him'. And I look at him, like, obviously the most gorgeous because Italians can be really easy on the eye. You know, just so Mediterranean and… I don't know, with that nose and those… big hands and big feet.
"Anyway, so then he looks at me, but he gives me that little player look, like that little boy look, and that just irritated the f*** out of me. Because I can already tell that he knows he's beautiful.". The whirlwind romance hit new heights as three months later, Zoe and Marco wed in Babington House in Somerset. She was in the UK at the time shooting the first Guardians Of The Galaxy movie. But trying to shoehorn the wedding in the middle of a million-dollar production was no mean feat.
"I was working on Monday. So when we found out last-minute that I couldn't do it [get married] on a Saturday and it had to be on that Monday, I was like, 'Oh God, I don't want to come straight from work!'" Zoe said. "I went up to the AD [assistant director Jamie Christopher] and I said, 'Is it okay if I ask for Monday off?' And they're like, 'Well, you never do that in a production'. And I said, 'Well, the thing is... I'm getting married on Sunday'.
"And I remember he had, like, an internal conversation with himself of all the moving pieces that he had to do. And then he finally told himself in front of me, 'It must be done. It must be done. Don't worry, darling. I got you'. And I was just like crying. I'm like, thank you so much.". Aside from her BAFTA win, Zoe is also up for the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as lawyer Rita in Emilia Perez. The movie itself leads the Oscars pack with 13 nominations, the most ever for a non-English language film.
