Rosa Salazar never meant to do Hollywood first. After a tumultuous childhood, a period spent living out of her car, and a stint in standup comedy, the wily American actor formulated a plan. “I was going to earn my stripes with theatre, and then TV, and then I was going to do movies...” she says. “None of that happened.”
Instead, within just a few years of starting out, Salazar was neck-deep in the business of blockbusters. Supporting roles in large-scale films like The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015), Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015), and Netflix’s Bird Box (2018) led to a starring one: the title part in James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel, playing an all-action cyborg in a child’s body. Co-starring Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali, Alita was somehow both an ardently pored-over cult object and a considerable commercial success. (It made $405m – more money, for example, than the first Toy Story.) It was a big film, and Salazar was the moon-eyed, CGI-rendered face of it.
