One of Zoe Saldana’s earliest memories, as a girl growing up in the Dominican Republic, was of the Star Trek theme tune blaring out from the television set, while three generations of her family – mother, grandmother, great-grandmother – sat watching it.

Saldana does a full-voiced rendition of the show’s opening fanfare. “I would look over and all these three women were glued to the television, watching the series in Spanish. It’s so funny. It was the first series that I would experience vicariously through their eyes.”

Twenty years after her first exposure to Star Trek, the US-born, half-Dominican, half-Puerto Rican actress got her big break in JJ Abrams’s 2009 blockbuster reboot of the series, playing Starfleet communications officer Uhura.

Saldana, now 37, legs folded beneath her on a sofa at the St Regis hotel in Atlanta, puts it all down to fate.

“This was something that the universe and I were working in conjunction to make happen,” she says. “Every now and then I have moments in my life when I look up and say, ‘How did you know I wanted this so bad’?”

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