Nevertheless, as well-practiced as she is, Zendaya still finds it hard, turning on. “It is one of those things that I’m like, Oh, shit, I haven’t done this in a second,” she says of the shows and shoots on her schedule in Paris. The stakes have also changed in recent years: Somewhere between the first and second seasons of Euphoria, the HBO drama that won her those two Emmys, and the three Spider-Man movies she’s made with Tom Holland, her boyfriend of a few years, she became Zendaya—and in the public imagination, if there’s one thing Zendaya does, it’s turn a look. (Needless to say, when she was announced in February as a co-chair of this year’s Met Gala, along with Bad Bunny, Chris Hemsworth, and Jennifer Lopez, the response online was, in a word, feral.)
“When I was younger there was less pressure,” she says. But now, while she’s in town for the couture—and can’t exit a building without trending on X—Zendaya has little choice but to become that girl again. “I got to get into a zone of being that part of myself, which is definitely not a thousand percent natural,” she allows. “She gets rusty.”
To her 184 million–odd admirers—if Instagram is anything to go by—one of Zendaya’s greatest gifts is to seem both improbably perfect (so tall, so poised, so plugged into all the right things, from racial justice to voting rights) and somehow familiar, like the girl everyone got along with in high school. “I still have to sometimes try to not fangirl when I’m around her,” says the 20-year-old actor Storm Reid, who plays her younger sister on Euphoria. The two first met over a decade ago, at a Ben & Jerry’s in Los Angeles, where Reid—then about nine—timidly asked for a picture. Within a few years they’d be singing Beyoncé songs together in Zendaya’s trailer. “She’s still one of my biggest inspirations, and I think she’s just so incredibly talented.”
Zendaya has channeled that alluring, unknowable, It-girl-next-door thing into a knack for playing good people with secrets: a teenage spy in K.C. Undercover; the charming but manipulative addict Rue in Euphoria; the acerbic introvert Michelle, a.k.a. MJ, in Spider-Man: Homecoming. (When she first auditioned for the latter part, in about 2016, “to be honest with you, neither Kevin Feige nor I knew who she was,” says Amy Pascal, who has, with Feige, produced all of Zendaya’s Spider-Man films. “She was wearing no makeup and she was just dressed like a regular girl, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, she’s amazing. She has to be in the movie.’ And then we found out she was a totally famous person, and felt really stupid.”) She’s also been a sylphlike acrobat—introduced with the words “Who’s that?”—in The Greatest Showman, and, as Chani in Dune, a shimmering desert mirage turned love interest–slash–mentor–slash–skeptic of Timothée Chalamet’s messianic Paul Atreides.
But Zendaya’s character in Challengers—the long-anticipated sports drama from director Luca Guadagnino and writer Justin Kuritzkes, postponed from a fall 2023 release to this April by the SAG-AFTRA strike—is a different story. Tashi Duncan is very, very clear about who she is: As a teen, she’s a tennis star with the world on a string (read: a junior title, a cushy sponsorship deal, and a spot at Stanford); then, after a career-ending injury, she’s a fiercely competitive coach, angling to win her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), his first US Open. (Art himself is somewhat less committed to this goal.) But the spanner in the works is Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend, whom they run up against at a would-be low-stakes qualifying tournament in New York. As Art and Patrick face off across the court, their contest is, evidently, as much about proving themselves to Tashi as advancing to the Open.
