All About Zoe Saldaña’s Husband, Marco Perego Saldaña

Actress Zoe Saldaña and her husband Marco Perego Saldaña have been married for a decade and have three children: 7-year-old Zen and 9-year-old twins Cy and Bowie. The couple is low-key on social media, but they nevertheless talk openly about their relationship and compatibility. Perego Saldaña gets interviewed less frequently as an artist, but he backs his wife up on the important stuff.

Following news of Saldaña’s first Oscar nomination in January 2025, Perego Saldaña led the celebration with their children. He later attended multiple awards shows beside his wife, who thanked him during her acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards: “And to my husband with that beautiful hair, the biggest honor of my life is being your partner. You hung the moon in our beautiful, perfect sons, Cy, Bowie, and Zen. They fill our skies every night with stars.”

Here’s everything we know about Perego Saldaña.

Originally from Salo, Italy, Perego Saldaña broke into the art world in the U.S. as an adult. Back home, his mother was a homemaker, and his dad worked as a server in a restaurant. He moved to New York City and also worked as a busboy, a waiter, and a soccer teacher. He was once tapped to play on Venice’s professional soccer team. That would have taken his life in an entirely different direction, but Perego Saldaña suffered an injury at 21 and was focused on art-making by the time he healed up.

Perego Saldaña got big when film producer Gilda Moratti first took an interest in his work.

“I was living [in] Spanish Harlem without money, and I was living on 104th Street,” he told the New York Observer. “One day what happened was, I come to her and I say, ‘Listen, look at my work, tell me what you think. If it is a joke, I will try to find something else.’”

Moratti did not think he was a joke. Once she bought a painting of his, more and more tastemakers started doing it. Perego Saldaña has since been been featured at Art Basel, the Royal Arts Academy in London, Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzynska, and the Museo Tuscolano in Rome. He has also worked on ad campaigns, painting the background for Dolce & Gabbana’s “Where Fashion Meets Art” photos in 2008.

The couple’s relationship was first noted in May 2013, when they were seen kissing at the premiere of Star Trek: Into the Darkness. But Saldaña knew her future husband way before then, telling The Hollywood Reporter in July 2014, “I’ve known my partner for five years. I knew of his work. I knew of him. Then we met. And months later, we both made the decision to do what we both individually vowed never to do—to get married.”

“As soon as we decided we were going to get married, we didn’t wait. We did it three weeks later,” she continued. “That part was very, very quick.”

They were married over the summer of 2013. The newlyweds were first photographed wearing wedding rings that September as they left Loulou’s members club in Mayfair together.

“I don’t do the ABCs, I do what my heart says, what my heart feels. So, from the moment I met my husband, we were together. We knew,” Saldaña told Marie Claire in 2014. “I met my husband, I wasn’t going to try it out and see if it works. No, I felt it. I went with the feeling.”

The couple bought a Montecito, California mansion in fall 2023 that was priced at $17.5 million. The purchase made them neighbors to celebrities such as Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Portia de Rossi.

They make public appearances here and there.

In March 2024, they were seen in New York City, leaving the Bowery Hotel before Saldaña’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Saldaña was promoting her movie The Absence of Eden.

In April 13, they attended the 2024 Breakthrough Prize Ceremony at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. Perego Saldaña wore a black suit, and Saldaña was in a strapless black sequin dress and matching heels.

In December 2024, they attended a photo-call in Turin, Italy, for Emilia Pérez. They were joined on the red carpet by their three children.

Perego Saldaña later made multiple appearances alongside his wife at awards shows in 2025, including when she won an Oscar for Emilia Pérez.

In September 2024, Saldaña spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about the recognition the film has gotten from both her family and the acting world. She said, “I am happy that this industry that I’ve been a part of for almost 20 years is getting to see a very fundamental part of me that I felt I never got to showcase. I’m proud of my journey.”

She added, “But I love Jacques Audiard, and I love art. And getting the recognition? Just having people that I look up to be like, ‘Oh, hey! You?!’ I spent so many years wanting it, and then I stopped wanting it. I thought it was never going to happen. So having someone like Jacques kind of go, ‘I see you’? It’s healing, because I’ve had to navigate this world and feel kind of, at times, invisible. There is a place that I’ve existed in, and I’ve been told by a lot of people in positions of power, ‘No, this is what you can do. This is all you can do.’ And last summer I was like, ‘I hear you—but I’m going to do more.’ For that to have been acknowledged? For us to have been acknowledged? I was watching it [the Cannes awards ceremony] live in Texas ’cause I was shooting. I was with my folks and my husband’s folks and my children and my sisters and my dog and my cat. And to see my sons crying because they called my name? I don’t know where this is going to lead, but it led here today, and I’m taking it day by day. I’m so grateful that this movie brought me back to ballet and brought me back to myself.”

On January 23, Saldaña received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for Emilia Pérez. She shared 20 photos on Instagram showcasing how she felt about the news. While Perego Saldaña and their children appear in several slides, the last photo features them all together with a “we’re so proud” cake.

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Did the couple attend the 2025 Oscars together?

Yes. Perego Saldaña was on the red carpet with Saldaña on the night she won Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Saldaña thanked him in her Oscar acceptance speech, saying, “And to my husband with that beautiful hair, the biggest honor of my life is being your partner. You hung the moon in our beautiful, perfect sons, Cy, Bowie, and Zen. They fill our skies every night with stars.”

They went on to celebrate at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party, where they were photographed cuddling on the red carpet.

She starred in his 2024 movie that he co-wrote and directed.

In The Absence of Eden, Saldaña plays an undocumented immigrant named Isabelle who leaves her home in Mexico. Perego co-wrote and directed the feature film.

“I was really proud of him, that out of all the subjects that he could be, you know, building a story around, he chose immigration and the angle of humanity, which keeps us very neutral, but also keeps us in the form of art of telling stories that are compelling about human beings, about people,” Saldaña told CBS News. “For me it was, ‘Okay, how I can talk about humanity in more of a global aspect?’”

Perego Saldaña shared that he spent two years along the border, saying, “My biggest goal was to be as honest as possible when I was telling the story.”

Saldaña added, “It’s also people who work in law enforcement that have a duty to fulfill and sometimes that conflicts with their moral code or how they’re feeling in the core about what they’re doing.”

This was their first time working together on a movie project, which led to some disagreements.

“When she speaks Spanish, I’m in trouble,” Perego joked. “I feel like the more experience we have, it’ll continue to get better and better.”

What has the couple said about their marriage?

After their whirlwind wedding, the couple welcomed twins Cy and Bowie in November 2014, and then their youngest son, Zen, in December 2016. Saldaña has said that she and her husband try to keep things “gender neutral” in the boy-heavy household.

“We have a very gender-neutral environment where my husband participates in a lot of tasks that were normally given to women and vice versa,” she told Us Weekly in 2018. “I get to do a lot of male things, which is, I don’t know, put the TV together, fix things that break. We’re sort of a very gender-fluid household. I think it’s important to raise boys in that environment, and girls as well.”

In 2019, she said she was done having children.

“I pulled my feminist card out. I [told my husband], ‘No. The answer is no,’” she said. “I’m like, ‘You only give me boys so just get over it. You need to come to terms with this.’ It’s like, ‘Let’s raise amazing, elegant men that will bring home even better women,’ you know? That’s it.”

In 2023, she told People that parenting is the “most amazing thing, but it’s real.”

“We are here to set very big tones for them in life on how to be, how to react, how to regulate, how to repair, how to heal, how to stand up for yourself,” she said. “So they’re going to be constantly mirroring what you do, knowing that you’re being observed at all times. It definitely makes you a lot more mindful than you have ever been in your whole entire life.”

She added that she’s not raising her sons in “gender-specific roles” and is encouraging them to “honor themselves, their femininity, to celebrate their feminine self as well.”

“We’re very hard on our boys the same way we’re hard on women. And boys are encouraged to be strong and to suppress their emotions,” she said. “And then once you learn to do that so much for so long, you become completely excommunicated from your feelings. We definitely understood the assignments and accepted it knowing that we were raising boys during a time when women’s movements are so important.”

Did Saldaña’s husband really take her last name?

Yes. Stirring up a lot of online conversation, Saldaña confirmed in 2015 while doing a cover interview with InStyle that he had adopted her surname.

“I tried to talk him out of it,” she said. “I told him, ‘If you use my name, you’re going to be emasculated by your community of artists, by your Latin community of men, by the world.’ But Marco looks up at me and says, ‘Ah, Zoe, I don’t give a sheet.’”

Later, she added that he saw it as becoming part of her family.

“He liked it,” she said. “He wanted to really represent being a part of my family and represent my father’s legacy. He respected the fact that he didn’t want me to have to give up my name just because that’s the norm.”

Eventually, she addressed the controversy online with a long Facebook post about her husband’s decision.

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