It’s no secret that Zoe Saldaña’s been part of several onscreen love stories, but her real-life proposal story was movie-worthy itself.
When Saldaña, 45, and husband Marco Perego appeared on the Wednesday, April 3, episode of The Drew Barrymore Show, the couple talked about their engagement and how it involved the Italian director and producer telling the actress a little white lie.
“I say to Zoe, ‘I’m going to New York, I need to do something for work,’” Perego, 45, revealed.
However, he flew somewhere else entirely.
“I actually went to the Dominican Republic,” he explained. “[Thankfully] her stepfather and her family supported me and I went to see her….” he said before Saldaña excitedly cut him off and said, “My father, my father’s grave.”
Perego then showed a picture he took of her father’s gravestone and added, “I asked him if I can marry her.”
Saldaña who lost her dad when she was 9 years old after he was killed in a car crash in 1987, shared that she had no idea Perego had flown all that way just so her father could still be part of their upcoming engagement.
After returning from his romantic gesture, Perego confessed that the next steps in his plan didn’t go the way he imagined.
“When I arrived back to London, she didn’t know I went there and she said, ‘Where have you been?’ and I say, ‘I’ve been in a place, but you need to wait a couple of hours and I’ll let you know,’” Perego recalled.
However, Saldaña wasn’t a fan of his answer and stormed off. “We’re in a cab in London in the middle of traffic and I’m like, ‘What? Are you… You know what…” then I just got out of the cab and I’m walking in the middle of the street and it was just very dramatic,” she noted.
After chasing after her, Perego said he ended up disclosing where he had been and popped the question right then and there.
“I went after her and was like, ‘Zoe I have something to say something to you,’ and she say, ‘Absolutely not.’ And then ‘I say, ‘No, I need to say something to you’ and I showed her the video and she said ‘Yes.’”
Saldaña and Perego got married in 2013 after meeting on a cross-country flight.
“It was at 6 o’clock in the morning, and it was like a Virgin America flight from Los Angeles to New York post-Thanksgiving,” Saldaña shared on the show.
Shortly after their flight together, Perego said the Guardians of the Galaxy star visited him and they haven’t left each other’s side since. “She came down to the studio that day and we never separated,” he gushed.
The couple now share three children together, twin sons Cy and Bowie, 9, and a younger son, Zen, 7.
