Zoe Saldaña Brings Another Complicated Woman to Life On-Screen With ‘Special Ops: Lioness’

Taylor Sheridan properties are always a layered look at characters and situations. But what makes Special Ops: Lioness special is that it focuses the story on women in a way his other shows and movies have not. It also helps that Zoe Saldaña mines every bit of complexity in her character of Joe.

Talking with Saldaña about the show (which is very loosely based on a real group of special operatives working undercover to infiltrate a terrorist network in the Middle East), one of the things that stuck out about her performance was how real the women in Lioness felt despite the incredible circumstances they found themselves in. For Saldaña, the balance between Joe’s personal life with her badass special ops side is what helped her ground and understand the character.

“It feels like a real woman to me,” Saldaña said when I asked about the different sides of Joe. “It just feels like a real woman that has a full-time career and a full-time role as a mother and a wife and a partner at home and a family. This is what you do, you do your best in all the roles that you’re taking on.”

That then brought me to a question that I have always found fascinating about those who work with Sheridan. Everyone has said that you get your pages and nothing changes and that improvisation is typically not part of the process of his properties. I was curious if there was any back and forth in sculpting Joe or if it was just the character that Sheridan had created.

“Yes, I like Taylor’s point of view. I like Taylor as a showrunner. I like the control that Taylor has of his material because it feels really safe, what he writes and the cadence and the rhythm that you pick up as you’re reading his material is exactly how it’s going to be,” she said. “And he envisions it, he writes it how he envisions it, and then he executes it. And that feels so rewarding then to have, another experience where you read something excellent and you sign up for what’s on the page, but then by the time you get to see the final product, it’s gone through so many opinions and so many rewrites and drafts and re-edits and reshoots that you end up disheartened and I hate to admit that I’ve been very disheartened in the past. But not for Lioness. I was really proud of the product, the end product.”

Another fascinating thing about working with Sheridan is that he gives actors the scene that they’re shooting, as they’ll shoot it, at the start. So I asked how that process was for her and if it helped her in crafting her character knowing that nothing was going to change.

“It helps so much,” she said. “It gives you a sense of security that what all the work that you’re putting into this, you’re gonna see. And you’re not gonna be surprised and you’re not gonna be disappointed and you’re not gonna be sacrificed because of all the politics that take over when it comes to the marketing departments. When a film finally gets to the marketing department, so many things are altered. And this wasn’t the case. Taylor has full creative control over his material, and I feel like that’s what resonates the most with his followers, his audience. So it’s incredibly rewarding to know that what you’re reading and what you are doing is gonna resemble pretty close to what the end product’s gonna look like.”

Building a relationship

Part of what works with Lioness is the relationships. You have Joe in her working dynamics and then you have Joe and Neil (Dave Annable) as they are trying to navigate what their marriage looks like. Saldaña talked about how she approaches that dynamic and the truth she can find in those relationships.

“I like to approach things as close to the heart as possible,” she said. “What I saw between Joe and her husband was a family, that was a man and a woman, that they both signed up to serve. He’s an oncologist, a pediatric oncologist. So that is a very hard form of medicine to pursue. But he does it because he has all the heart for it, right? And so does Joe, she has all the heart to serve, all the willingness to serve, so they understand that they cannot be each other’s first in their lives. I feel that the mistake that they made is that they really genuinely love what they do, their callings, and they also really genuinely are in love with each other.”

She went on to talk about the characters’ love for each other and the family they created. “They had a family, they made a family, and that pulls them away from what they’re doing and it compromises them and it makes them feel guilty and it makes them feel responsible and it makes them feel resentful,” she said. “That’s a real marriage, that’s a real union. That’s real love between two people that come together to become one, but are still individuals, right? And so that’s sort of what I saw and what I loved about what Taylor created for these characters, that he gave them a love story. Like he didn’t want Joe’s marriage to be falling apart while the world, America’s falling apart. Taylor wanted Joe to be in love with her partner and for her partner to be in love with her and for them to want to be together and want to be with their kids and want to make it work. And that is aspirational.”

We also spoke with Dave Annable, who plays Neil, about the show! You can see our chat here:

Both Annable and star Mike Kelly had nothing but good things to say about the process of working on Special Ops: Lioness. In fact, they both very much wanted to take on a second season of the hit Paramount+ series.

You can see our conversation with Kelly about the show and his hopes for a season 2 here:

Special Ops: Lioness is streaming now and you can also get your copy of the first season on digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD!

(featured image: Paramount+)