As Zoe Saldaña's character said in Center Stage, "I'm not dancing for them anymore. I'm dancing for me."
And that was the attitude the actress embraced for her big screen debut as Eva Rodriguez in the 2000 ballet film—even after getting some questionable career advice.
"When I did Center Stage, I remember being discouraged by my management at that time to use my name," Saldaña, 43, told Entertainment Weekly in an on-camera interview posted March 11. "But their intention was never for me to stop being who I am. They celebrated who I was."
She continued, "My manager at the time was a former singer and a ballroom performer, and she did change her name as well, when she was a teenager back in the '60s, I believe. And she said it's what everybody does. That, today, is advice that we consider poor but that was her doing the best that she wanted for me. But I still knew that I liked my name."
However, at an early age, the actress did follow another person's advice to change the spelling of her name and its pronunciation.
"I'm Zoe Saldaña," she told E!'s Justin Sylvester in a recent interview. "I was the one that sort of introduced myself into my career as 'Saldana.' But it happened very, very early in my life. I was in kindergarten and the teacher that I had at the time just was the one who made that correction for me. She said, 'The letter 'ñ' does not exist in the English language, and you are 'Saldana.'"
Her reaction at the time? "I was just like, you know, you're 5. What are going to do?" she said. "You're going to go, 'OK.'"
Years after the release of Center Stage, a box office bomb that became a fan-favorite after being released on DVD, Saldaña's career soared. The actress went on to star in Steven Spielberg's The Terminal, James Cameron's Avatar and its upcoming sequels, as well as the Star Trek film series, the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and the final Avengers installments.
Saldaña can now be seen in the new sci-fi film The Adam Project. Ryan Reynolds plays a fighter pilot who travels back from the year 2050 to stop time travel from being discovered to save his wife Laura, played by the actress, with the help of his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell). Mark Ruffalo plays his late father. The Adam Project was released on Netflix on March 11.
See Saldaña and the rest of the cast of Center Stage, then and now.