Zoe Saldana felt she was being "difficult" when she asked for directors to arrange her childcare.
Zoe Saldana and Marco Perego
The 'Guardians of the Galaxy' star - who has 18-month-old twin boys Cy and Bowie with her husband Marco Perego - returned to work soon after giving birth to her children and was amazed by how she was made to feel when she asked for babysitting to be covered by her expenses.
She said: "The tone changed in the negotiations. I was starting to feel that I was ... difficult. [For babysitting to be] considered a perk, or, 'Give this to me; I'm having a diva fit'? No. This is a necessity that you must cover for me in order for me to go and perform my job.
"The fact that there are women working in these studios - and they're the ones [enforcing] these man-made rules. When are we going to learn to stick together?"
The 37-year-old actress had a tough pregnancy, having to give birth to her sons prematurely by emergency C-section and admits there was a time when they got emotional as it came "close to it all changing forever".
She added to the new issue of Allure magazine: "The boys came at 32 weeks. They found protein in my urine; my platelets crashed. I didn't qualify for an epidural, so I delivered under general anesthetic. I didn't even meet them until a day later ...
"Looking back, I think the boys were three or four months old, and one morning I woke up with just this flood of emotions. Marco had them, too, and we were able to have our deconstruction session in the bathroom while they were napping, to say to each other, 'Holy s**t, did we come close to it all changing forever?' We allowed ourselves to have a moment of 'poor us.' And that was it. Then somebody cried, and it was, 'Got to go!'"
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