By Rollo Ross and Danielle Broadway LOS ANGELES, - For Zoe Saldana, whose parents were Spanish-speaking immigrants to the U.S., getting the opportunity to finally play a Spanish-speaking Latina role makes her latest movie, "Emilia Perez," rather special.
"The moment I embarked on this career in cinema, I rarely ever got the opportunity to play a full-on Latina that could speak fluently in Spanish consistently in a story," she said. "And I was yearning for that." "Emilia Perez" is a musical crime and comedy film written and directed by French director Jacques Audiard that mostly takes place in Mexico City.
Based on Audiard's opera libretto of the same name, "Emilia Perez" was released in the UK and Ireland last week and arrives in U.S. and Canadian theaters on Friday.
It will stream on Netflix on Nov. 13. In the film, Saldana portrays a jaded lawyer stuck in a dead-end job who helps drug cartel leader Juan "Manitas" Del Monte, played by Karla Sofia Gascon, to fake his death and transition from a man to a woman named Emilia Perez.
The cast also includes singer Selena Gomez as Jessi Del Monte, the wife of the cartel leader. For Gomez, playing Jessi enabled her to connect her culture and her career in a new way. "That's a huge part of my life that I didn't feel connected to for a while, just because I started to work when I was 7, and most of my jobs were in English," Gomez said.
"So, I really felt like this was important." Similarly, as a transgender woman, Gascon felt that port.
