Is Zendaya the Leading Lady We’ve Been Looking for?
Two critics face off about the actor’s Challengers performance and debate whether she knows how to serve onscreen as well as on the red carpet.
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In the magazine biz, we have a shorthand for stars of a certain caliber: cover-only. As in, don’t even try to request an interview unless she’s going on the cover. As in, you won’t get the time you need even if you do promise a cover. When a star goes cover-only, her publicists are informing the press of where they stand: This star no longer needs you. Now, you need her — you lowly, pathetic worms.
Zendaya’s been cover-only long enough that it’s surprising to be reminded she’d never been a leading lady on the big screen. This week, she finally assumes her proper place in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers as Tashi, an ultracompetitive former tennis prodigy whose truncated career does nothing to deter fellow players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) from obsessing over her. As critic Matt Zoller Seitz writes in his recent essay on the actor, “Like so many movies built around the charisma of their stars, Challengers is … a film about how people can’t help being in love with Zendaya.” He sees in her the same kind of power exhibited by a young Julia Roberts, whose face held the camera in a death grip. On the other hand, film critic Angelica Jade Bastién has never been convinced by Zendaya’s talent. In her review of Challengers she writes that the actor is “treated as the film’s gravitational force even though she’s playing a sketch of a woman.” While she admires Zendaya’s poise on the red carpet, onscreen, “The charisma and intensity just aren’t there.”
This week in The Critics — New York’s weekly newsletter on all things cultural criticism — I brought these two dissenters together to talk it out. One thing everyone can agree on: Zendaya is singular, albeit in ways that may say more about Hollywood than they do about her.
When did you first become aware of Zendaya?
Angelica Jade Bastién: I was aware of her existence as a Disney kid, and I didn’t give a shit about them kids when I was a kid. When I became older, do you think I would follow Zendaya? No. The first time I really saw her act was in Euphoria’s first season, and I was like, “Okay.” That was my response. “Okay.” She does hit better there: The character’s young and she still reads young, even though she’s now 27. She’s better at portraying anger than other emotions. I don’t think she’s great at it, but I do think that’s her thing.
Matt Zoller Seitz: I saw her in some Disney Channel shows, secondhand through my kids. She didn’t make any particular impression on me. When I saw her in Euphoria, I was kind of bowled over. What impresses me most is that she’s called upon to do something that I think is impossible, which is hold that show together. Euphoria is this entropy machine, like somebody threw a bunch of ping-pong balls in a dryer and hit the button. I don’t understand how any human could give it any semblance of coherence, even with narration. But I think she does it. I agree with Angelica that she’s more authoritative in that role because she seems very contemporary. Zendaya has a face that knows what a cell phone is.
Even though Challengers is only her first big-screen leading role, Matt, in your essay you write about how she’s already reached the status of Julia Roberts 30 years ago. As in, a film’s marketing team will have so much confidence in her fame that they will literally just promote behind-the-scenes footage of her walking around set. How did you start thinking about her that way?
M.Z.S.: I’m kind of in the tank for her, I’ve got to say. I don’t know if it’s because maybe I look at her and see my kids — which is weird to say because she plays so many troubled characters and, as far as I know, my kids aren’t troubled. In my piece, I mentioned Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and Will Smith because what all three of them have in common is an authority that seems to have an edge of anger. There’s a kind of a volatility underneath them, and Zendaya has been good about picking roles that channel that. She was in Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie, and while I didn’t care for that film, again, she held it together. Her role as Chani in Dune is almost unplayable — I mean, it was when Sean Young tried to do it in the original Dune directed by David Lynch — and I think she pulls it off. The ascension of Paul Atreides to ruler of the galaxy in Dune: Part Two is framed through her eyes, and her anger, that sense of having been disrespected, animates her. For Challengers, I’m just going to call it right now: She’s going to get an Oscar nomination.
A.J.B.: If she does, I want y’all to know that I will be on a tear. I don’t even give a fuck about the Oscars. But I will have a lot to say. I have a lot of thoughts on why she’s the only major Black actress from the younger set.
Let’s jump into that. So you’re saying from the younger set, she’s the only major Black actress who —
A.J.B.: Has power?
Who has power, who is getting those producing credits. She made Challengers happen. She and her co-producers, Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor, are the ones who took on Justin Kuritzkes’s script and hired Luca Guadagnino. It was implied in her Vogue profile that it was Zendaya’s choice to cast Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor.
A.J.B.: To riff on a line from the movie: Zendaya does love her little white boys. She has said that she knows she’s the industry’s “acceptable version of a Black girl,” and I think that’s something we have to keep in mind when watching her. This is not on her, but Hollywood’s return to whiteness is actually astounding. They said, “DEI, get out of here. Negroes, who?” I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about how that’s reflected onscreen. It’s interesting to see how Zendaya navigates that. Besides John David Washington in Malcolm & Marie, has she really had Black romantic partners or even interacted intimately with Black people onscreen? There’s her mom and sister in Euphoria, but beyond that, she tends to exist in a very white milieu. She’s not only the acceptable version of a Black girl in Hollywood because she’s thin and light-skinned and biracial. I think it’s because … now this is going to sound mean: I think she gives them the veneer of Black women’s anger but not the full experience of it.
MLC: What does that mean to you?
A.J.B.: It’s kind of weird for Challengers to have that white-boy line because it’s a movie that doesn’t actually give a shit about race. Do you think white people are comfortable with Black women’s actual, fully embodied anger? Of course not. It would turn to them. It is hard for me to look at her as an exalted actress who deserves all of this power because there are so many talented young Black actors who get one good role before their careers flatline. Look at the men in Moonlight, Trevante Rhodes and Ashton Sanders. Look at Anna Diop from Nikyatu Jusu’s film Nanny — that woman is amazing. I’m happy there’s a powerful Black actress, but the fact that Zendaya is pretty much the only younger one who has this kind of power is not a compliment to her but a diss toward Hollywood. If she was so instrumental in the casting of Challengers, it behooves us to ask, “Why are you surrounded by white people if you have the power not to be?”
With her performances, I think of Katharine Hepburn’s quote about Meryl Streep: “click, click, click” — you can hear the wheels turning. It always feels like I’m watching someone play-act in their older sister’s clothes. Tashi is a tricky role because she’s really just the complication in these two men’s relationship, which seems more important to the film, emotionally, than she is. I don’t think she’s a strong gravitational force. Watching Dune, I kept thinking that she and Timothée Chalamet come across as besties, not people who actually want to fuck each other. She doesn’t bring sexual heat. Sensuality is really hard to play, and we are living in a very un-sensual era in general. I think people are feral, horny, and sad, and they’re not getting fucked. And I can tell by their movie taste.
This is making me think about child stars in general. How do you even develop your sensuality, or your politics, if you’ve never known anything else — when your entire world has been about being the breadwinner for your parents?
M.Z.S.: So many of the leading men and women who are even halfway interesting now are products of the Disney/Nickelodeon finishing school: Ryan Gosling, Zac Efron. I can’t even imagine the acrobatic loops that the mind has to go through in order to understand what it’s like to be “normal” if you’ve grown up that way. Looking at Zendaya in press events and on the red carpet, she seems to have taken a lot of her notes from the big pop divas like Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift. I can almost imagine her studying them. That robot suit that she wore to the premiere of Dune: Part Two jumped out at me because it’s basically an image borrowed from Metropolis, as if she was saying that this film should also be inducted into the pantheon of great science fiction. That functions on an almost subterranean level. That, to me, is a producer’s mentality.
We have to discuss her stylist, Law Roach.
A.J.B.: Her best collaborator. It’s honestly very cunning how Roach has styled her. That Thierry Mugler robot suit is stunning. She’s great on the red carpet. She has a little fun, charm, and energy. She can be a little saucy, she can be more seductive. And I don’t see that onscreen! To your point about how there are so many Disney and Nickelodeon kids now becoming the stars, maybe a big reason why I’m not feeling them is because they’re not rooted in grounded experiences. They’re at a level of existence that’s so disconnected from the way people move, talk, their energy, everything.
M.Z.S.: It’s always been true to some extent, but it seems to be getting worse.
A.J.B.: I think it is. One of my favorite stars, Elizabeth Taylor, was a child actress. You would think she has no grounding in real emotion, but she’s one of the strongest emotional actors of Hollywood history despite that. I don’t want to say that no stars are good at portraying emotions — I mean, I love stars. The ones whom I love are just old as hell or they’re dead. Who was it that said actors freeze in time at the point when they got famous, and that’s why so many of them are so immature?
M.Z.S.: That’s why Tom Cruise wasn’t believable as an adult until he was well into his 40s.
A.J.B.: Even then he’s a strange, strange man. A little freak in my opinion.
How does this translate into Zendaya playing a mother in Challengers?
M.Z.S.: I found it believable. The character had her daughter young, and she’s rich, so she has someone to take care of the kid. That wasn’t something that hampered my ability to believe in her character, who is kind of an absurd character on her face. From the beginning of the movie she marches in and dictates the terms by which we’re going to engage with this fiction. And if she doesn’t come on like some kind of a bulldozer, then the movie doesn’t work. For me, she worked. I believe her as that bulldozer.
A.J.B.: If there was no actual kid onscreen, I would be like, “She ain’t no mom.” My big problem is that her physicality doesn’t change throughout the movie — which you think it would because, one, we watch her injure herself, and two, we see her before and after she has a kid, and three, this is supposed to be a very physical movie. Zendaya is cunning about everything that leads up to the movie, like the casting, and then after, on the red carpet. But when it comes to actual hunger for artistic experience, I don’t see it.
What would be satisfying for you to see her do next?
A.J.B.: I am curious about Zendaya in her 30s. For me, the test of a Black actor as an industry force is how they interact with other Black creatives and what kind of Black creatives they support. I want to see how Zendaya moves in a film where she’s directed by a Black woman and surrounded by more Black people in the cast. Does she loosen up? Does she not? Every Black performer has an understanding that the moment you start doing movies and there’s more Black people around you, people look at it as only a Black movie. That can be pigeonholing — even though Black film is so wide and diverse and beautiful and amazing, people have very limited ideas about it. I know people are going to read this and be like, “Does every Black actor have to work with Black people all the time?” Yeah, why the fuck wouldn’t you want to work with Black people? We’re the fucking coolest. What are we doing here?
M.Z.S.: She should just go ahead and direct. I think that’s what she wants to do anyway, and I’d like to see her direct and not act, the way that Robert Redford would do it. What is her version of Quiz Show or A River Runs Through It? I think she’d be good. She’s not going to go out there and wing it. You know that when she gets on to set, that shit’s going to be tight.