Why Isn’t Zoe Saldaña On Any Magazine Covers?
Zoe Saldaña’s career highlights, and the surprising holes in it, were highlighted this week by Allison Samuels in The Daily Beast. Basically was Samuels says is that, despite Saldaña’s huge success, she hasn’t been featured on a gajillion magazine covers like many other up-and-coming starlets. Why do you suppose that is?
An excerpt:
It’s hard to deny that the massive popularity actresses such as Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Gwyneth Paltrow enjoy is primarily fed by the numerous magazine covers they grace each month and not by their performances in critically acclaimed films.
So what about Zoe? In 2010 Saldana was famously absent from Vanity Fair’s annual Hollywood cover, even though in 2009 she’d gained the distinction of becoming the only actress to have three movies in the top 20 for three consecutive weeks. One of those films, Avatar, became the highest-grossing film of all time…
This month Vogue, Bazaar, Marie Claire, and Elle opted to go with the tried and true in their selections of famous faces for their September issues, and that didn’t include Zoe. Saldana managed to land on the covers of special-interest magazines such as Ebony and Latina.
So what Samuels says, quite eloquently, too, is that because Saldaña is a black woman who is also Latina, she doesn’t fit into culturally “accepted” notions of where either black women (singers like Beyoncé) should appear or where Latinas (such as the lighter skinned Jennifer Lopez) should appear in our media landscape. Which isn’t even to mention the fact that any women of color are absent from our media landscape generally speaking.
[Photo By Crisitano Del Riccio]