Zoe Saldana has tears running down her face as she encourages followers to love themselves

Zoe Saldana shared an empowering message with her 7.3 million Instagram followers on Monday.

The 42-year-old actress shared a close-up selfie – in which she appeared to shed a tear – captioning the shot, ‘Don’t let your mind bully your body,’ with the hashtag, #loveyourself.

In the black-and-white clip on Instagram Stories, the A-list actress had her dark locks pulled  back in a neat ponytail as she wore an Adidas activewear top.

Saldana has often used her platform for causes including social change and gender issues, having blazed a Hollywood trail with her appearances in blockbusters like Avatar and the Star Trek and Guardians of the Galaxy films.

The New Jersey-born beauty and husband Marco Perego, 41, who exchanged vows in 2013, are parents to three sons: twins Bowie and Cy, five, and Zen, three.

She said last year during a speaking engagement at in Amsterdam that she sought to play ‘a whole woman’ in her roles, according to Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

‘I’m not actively playing a strong woman,’ she said, ‘I’m just playing a whole woman versus something that is just there to be objectified and fill in all the boring spaces in a movie that come from a weak storyline.’

She added, ‘When I go for a job, or I start a business or I make a decision, it has never been because I’m a woman or because I’m a person of color. It is because I’m a human, I’m a voter, I’m a taxpayer, I’m a human being and because I matter.’

She said that studios were moving in the right direction in adding breadth and depth to female roles both on screen and in the writers’ room.

‘Women are so relevant in life, and in all places, that the logical thing to do is to capture them accurately and build them accurately,’ she said.