There are actors who have a good decade, and then there is Zoe Saldaña, who has spent roughly twenty years quietly standing inside the biggest films ever made, usually painted blue or green. In February 2023 Guinness World Records made it official: with Avatar: The Way of Water past the $2 billion mark, she became the actress with the most films to cross that line at the global box office. Three years on, that record reads less like a finish line and more like a progress report.
The $2 billion club, population: mostly her
The Guinness title is precise, so let me be precise too: “most films to surpass 2 billion US dollars at the global box office by an actress”, and the number is four. Avatar (2009), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Avatar: The Way of Water (2022). When Guinness wrote it up, only six films in history had cleared $2 billion. The other two were Titanic and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and she was in neither, which feels like a scheduling oversight on Hollywood’s part.
What strikes me is how little of that money her actual face earned on screen. Neytiri is motion capture, Gamora is green paint and prosthetics. She built the most bankable résumé of her generation largely in disguise, and the performance still came through. That is not luck. That is craft wearing a costume.
Fire and Ash, and the No. 1 spot
The record has since grown a sequel of its own. Avatar: Fire and Ash opened in December 2025, and Disney announced in January 2026 that it had passed $1 billion worldwide. It did not reach the $2 billion heights of its two predecessors (the Daily Star politely called its run “more modest”), but it held the No. 1 spot at the domestic box office for weeks, and it was enough to tip the all-time table.
In January 2026, citing data from The Numbers, outlets reported that Saldaña had overtaken Scarlett Johansson as the highest-grossing actor of all time. Not actress. Actor. Reported totals vary depending on who is counting and which week they counted, so I will not pick a number for you. The ranking is the story.
James Cameron, meanwhile, is hedging on parts four and five in his own way: “If we don’t get to make 4 and 5, for whatever reason, I’ll hold a press conference and I’ll tell you what we were gonna do.” My read: a director who threatens a press conference instead of a sequel is a director who fully expects to make the sequel.
The Oscar finally caught up
For years the box office loved her more than the awards circuit did. That ended on March 2, 2025, when Saldaña won Best Supporting Actress at the 97th Academy Awards for playing Rita, the lawyer at the center of Emilia Pérez. She had already taken the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice, BAFTA and SAG awards, so the envelope held few surprises.
The speech did. She thanked her mother first, called herself a proud child of immigrant parents and the first American of Dominican origin to accept an Academy Award, and spoke about her grandmother, who came to the US from the Dominican Republic in 1961. The film around her was not short of controversy that season; the praise for her performance was the one thing almost everyone agreed on.
Saldaña-Perego, party of five
Saldaña met the Italian artist Marco Perego in 2013 and they married that same year, quietly enough that the news arrived after the fact. Contrary to Hollywood habit, he took her surname, a detail she has talked about with obvious pleasure in interviews. They have three sons: twins Cy and Bowie, born in November 2014, and Zen, born in February 2017.
Her Instagram is still the best place to see the family side, where the boys appear far more often than any premiere.
What she is doing now: Lioness, and winning an argument
At 48, Saldaña is still leading Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ spy drama Lioness as CIA officer Joe McNamara. Season 3 premiered on August 2, 2026, and its finale, “The Unraveling”, ends with Joe coming home to a “For Sale” sign: her husband Neal has left with the children.
That ending was partly her doing. Saldaña told Entertainment Weekly that she kept pushing Sheridan on whether Neal would stay, describing their “little micro-disagreements” about it, and arguing that a parent would put the children first once violence reached the house. She has also said she is grateful he gave Neal the strength to leave. Paramount+ has not announced a fourth season yet, and she told People that “Joe McNamara and Lioness is all that I can handle at this time.” Any actor who wins an argument with Taylor Sheridan about his own script deserves a fourth season on principle.
My take
The 2023 headline was about a record. The 2026 version is about a career that kept compounding: the Guinness title, then the Oscar, then the No. 1 spot on the all-time box office list, all while doing her best work under paint, pixels or a tactical vest. Twenty years in disguise, and she is the one name on the poster everyone now recognizes.
Sources
- Zoe Saldaña on Instagram, October 2026
- Zoe Saldaña on Instagram (@zoesaldana)
- Guinness World Records: Most films to surpass $2 billion at the global box office by an actress
- Guinness World Records: Avatar 2’s Zoe Saldana smashes box office record (Feb 2023)
- The Walt Disney Company: Avatar: Fire and Ash surpasses $1 billion
- The Daily Star: Zoe Saldaña becomes the highest-grossing actor of all time (Jan 2026)
- Remezcla: Zoe Saldaña’s Oscar acceptance speech (video)
- TVLine: Zoe Saldaña and Taylor Sheridan disagreed over Lioness’ Season 3 finale (Oct 2026)
- The Tonight Show: Zoe Saldaña on Avatar: The Way of Water
