Zoe Saldana says filming Pirates of the Caribbean was ‘not a good experience’

Zoe Saldana has reflected on her experience filming the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, admitting she felt like she was “lost in the trenches of it a great deal”.

The actor, 44, starred in 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl as pirate smuggler Anamaria, opposite Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, she said: “It was my first exposure to a major Hollywood mega movie, where there were just so many actors and so many producers and so many crew members.

“We were shooting in different locations, and the environments were not that agreeable, sometimes, to our shoot days. I was very young, and it was just a little too big for me, and the pace of it was a little too fast.”

Saldana said that she “walked away not really having a good experience from it overall”, adding: “I felt like I was lost in the trenches of it a great deal, and I just didn’t feel like that was OK.”

The star claimed that, years later, producer Jerry Bruckheimer apologised to her for the experience on set.

“That really moved me – the fact that he remembered that I had mentioned that during press, I guess, or an engagement I had done years before and that he felt compelled to bring it up and to take accountability,” she said.

The Independent has contacted Bruckheimer’s representative for comment.

After the first Pirates of the Caribbean, Saldana went on to star in two Guardians of the Galaxy movies, two Star Trek films and Avatar.

She will appear in the long-awaited Avatar sequel, The Way of Water, out in the UK on 16 December, while her third and final Guardians of the Galaxy project will arrive in cinemas next May.

She is currently starring in Netflix weepie From Scratch, as a twentysomething postgrad studying art abroad.