One Road-Trip Movie Still Carries a Very Sweet Britney Memory
Dig this out: Zoë Saldaña is revisiting Crossroads and the young woman at the center of it, remembering Britney Spears as one of the “kindest, sweetest” people she encountered during the film.
The 2002 road-trip drama placed Spears, Saldaña and Taryn Manning together as childhood friends Lucy, Kit and Mimi, who reconnect after graduation and head toward Los Angeles with years of unfinished business packed beside them. Saldaña played Kit, the polished overachiever whose perfect-looking future begins coming apart once the trip gets moving.
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Revisit Britney’s Big-Screen Road Trip
Return to the world of Crossroads, then keep the early-2000s nostalgia moving with Britney Spears music and movie-night essentials.
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Directed by Tamra Davis from a screenplay by Shonda Rhimes, Crossroads opened in the United States on February 15, 2002. That makes the movie 24 years old in August 2026, with its true 25th anniversary arriving in February 2027. So the nostalgia is absolutely on schedule—the birthday candles are simply still one calendar turn away.
What Saldaña remembers most warmly is not the machinery around Britney Spears at the height of early-2000s pop fame, but the person underneath it. In the supplied Entertainment Tonight interview, she describes Spears with striking simplicity: kind and sweet. No grand mythology. No rewriting of the era. Just a former co-star remembering someone who treated the people around her well.
That memory carries extra weight because Crossroads arrived at a moment when Spears was being asked to expand an already enormous public identity into film. She was not merely appearing in a pop-star vehicle; she was carrying a studio release while surrounded by castmates who would go on to build very different careers of their own.
For Saldaña, the film became an early stepping stone in a screen career that eventually stretched across Star Trek, the Avatar films, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy universe and her Academy Award-winning performance in Emilia Pérez. Yet even with all that scale behind her, the memory she offers here is intimate rather than industrial.
The conversation then shifts from one of Saldaña’s earliest major films to one of her most physically and emotionally demanding current roles. She returns as CIA operative Joe McNamara in Lioness Season 3, which premiered August 2 on Paramount+.
The Taylor Sheridan series places Joe between covert operations and a home life that never remains safely separated from the mission. Season 3 brings that collision even closer, with hidden networks, foreign operatives and personal betrayals pushing the danger into every part of her world.
In the ET conversation with Emily Curl, Saldaña also discusses her connection to Joe’s toughness and the personal qualities she brings to a character built to carry pressure without ever being allowed the luxury of fully setting it down.
It is a revealing career contrast: the young Kit of Crossroads, trying to understand what happens when a carefully planned life falls apart, and Joe McNamara, trying to hold multiple dangerous realities together at once. Nearly a quarter-century separates the projects, but both ask Saldaña to find the person underneath a role that initially presents itself as composed and unbreakable.
Watch Zoë Saldaña Reflect on Britney Spears, Crossroads and Lioness Season 3
Entertainment Tonight’s Emily Curl speaks with Saldaña about her Britney Spears memories and returning as Joe McNamara for the third season of Lioness.
Source: Entertainment Tonight; Paramount+; AFI Catalog.
