4 min readZoe Saldaña met her now-husband, Marco Perego-Saldaña, on an airplane in 2013. The two fell in love quickly and married that same year, with the artist making the romantic decision to take the Lioness star’s last name, changing his name from Marco Perego to Marco Perego-Saldaña. Now, 13 years later, the two share a home, a family, and a life.
As Saldaña accepted her first-ever Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at the 2025 Academy Awards, she lovingly thanked her husband. “Thank you so much, and to my husband with that beautiful hair,” she said. “The biggest honor of my life is being your partner. You put the moon in our beautiful perfect sons, Cy, Bowie, and Zen. They fill our skies every night with stars.”
Ahead, everything to know about Marco Perego-Saldaña.
He is an Italian artist.
Born in Salò, Italy, Perego-Saldaña is an Italian fine artist known for his abstract, surrealist, often pop-art-inspired works relating to everything from anatomy to evolution, modern society, the world around us, and “new kinds of transformation and transcendence,” per his website.
You can find his pieces at museums and as part of private collections around the world, as well as in auctions.
He and Zoe fell head-over-heels in love.
Saldaña knew of her now-husband’s work as an artist before the two met, and when she saw him on a flight to New York City, it felt like fate.
“I just saw him from behind. It was 6:30 in the morning, [and] I was on a flight to New York,” she told USA Today in 2015. “And I can’t even describe to you, it was a vibration. He turned in that moment, because he felt the vibration as well.”
She added that she hadn’t ever believed in love at first sight until that moment. “I know people don’t believe in it; I didn’t believe in it. I’m a very Sigmund Freud person, I’m very logical,” she said. “But that—I’m okay not having an explanation for that. Because I don’t need to explain that. It was enough that I felt it. And that was it.”
They began dating almost immediately after that plane ride and were first seen out together in April 2013. Then, that same summer, they married in an intimate ceremony.
“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,” the actor told Marie Claire in 2014. She explained that both she and Perego had decided marriage was not for them before they met, but their love changed everything.
“As soon as we decided we were going to get married, we didn’t wait. We did it three weeks later. That part was very, very quick,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014.
He and Zoe have three sons.
The creatives are parents to Zen Anton, 7, and twins Cy Aridio and Bowie Ezio Perego-Saldaña, 9.
He took Zoe’s last name.
Like a true romantic, Perego-Saldaña took his wife’s last name after they wed. In her 2015 cover interview with InStyle, she admitted she actually tried to talk him out of it at first.
“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,’ ” she recalled. “But Marco looks up at me and says [imitating his Italian accent], ‘Ah, Zoe, I don’t give a sheet.’ ”
She later clarified her comments in a Facebook post. “Fathers, sons, brothers, men everywhere: Your legacy will not perish if you take your partner’s surname, or she keeps hers,” she wrote. “I felt proud that my husband decided to take my last name as his own … and I his. … He also asked me, ‘Why not? What are you so afraid of?’ And it made me wonder … What am I so afraid of?”
She continued, “Why is it so surprising, shocking, eventful that a man would take his wife’s surname? Women have never been asked if it’s ok for them to give up their names. Why doesn’t that make the news? Men, you will not cease to exist by taking your partner’s surname. On the contrary—you’ll be remembered as a man who stood by change. I know our sons will respect and admire their father more because their father led by example.”
He made Cannes Film Festival history.
Perego-Saldaña became the first producer to have three movies premiere in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition in 2026. The three films debuting in the main competition included Minotaur, Fjord, and Paper Tiger. Additionally, he worked as a producer on Butterfly Jam, which premiered separately in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes this year.
Saldaña not only joined him on the red carpet at the iconic film festival—where the two shared plenty of sweet PDA—but she also took to Instagram to express how proud she was of her husband for the achievement. “Marco, Three films at Cannes. Three worlds you believed in when maybe not everyone else did,” the actress wrote on Instagram. “That is not luck, that is you, exactly as you are: stubborn in the most beautiful way, uncompromising in your love for what cinema can be.
She continued, “You have always known that art is not decoration. It is the main course, the whole meal, the reason we sit down together at all. And you fight for that truth every single day, even when it costs you. I am so proud of you it almost doesn’t fit into words. All my love, always. 🎬❤️”
He’s Zoe’s biggest fan.
Perego-Saldaña is regularly seen on the red carpet next to his talented wife, and on his Instagram, he often shares posts celebrating her accomplishments and promoting them—from magazine covers to her award-winning performances in film and television.