Zoe Saldaña says no more Taylor Sheridan shows, Lioness is her only one
Taylor Sheridan's television empire operates on one rule: nobody does just one show. Actors check in, get handed a cowboy hat or a tactical vest, and resurface in three spinoffs later. One Oscar winner has now looked at that assembly line and said: absolutely not.
Zoe Saldaña has drawn her line, and it is shaped exactly like Joe McNamara.
Talking to PEOPLE this weekend, the Lioness star was asked about taking on more of the Sheridan-verse — a reasonable question, given that the man currently produces roughly half of scripted American television. Her answer was not coy:
"I can't imagine me taking on more of a Taylor Sheridan world. I think that Joe McNamara and Lioness is all that I can handle at this time."
The math checks out, honestly
Before anyone spins this as diva behavior, note her receipts:
"I'm number one on the call sheet. I am first one in, last one out. I am prepping months before anybody ever is able to prep."
She's also an executive producer on the show, which means the work doesn't end when someone yells cut. And this is a woman who is otherwise contractually welded to three of the biggest franchises in film history — she remains the first performer with four movies past the $2 billion mark, and the third Avatar just finished eating the global box office. "All I can handle" is doing a lot of quiet, exhausted work in that sentence. The CIA thriller — which dropped its third season on Paramount+ in August, with Nicole Kidman and Morgan Freeman still in tow — films like a military deployment, and she's the one leading it.
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About that Season 4
Here's where it gets interesting for anyone already rationing episodes: nothing is renewed, and Saldaña isn't pretending otherwise. "I don't know if we're able to go to a season 4," she admitted — and she's attached a condition: if it happens, she wants Michael Kelly back as Byron Westfield, no substitutions accepted.
So, to summarize the state of the union: one show, on her terms, with her preferred deputy director, or nothing. Meanwhile the rest of the Sheridan-verse will simply have to keep multiplying without her. It'll manage.
Previously we wrote: The Simpsons end date: Bart's voice actress just named a season — the showrunner sees it differently
