Zendaya’s Biggest Year Yet Is Just Getting Started
9 min readFor someone who projects a supreme confidence in front of the camera, Zendaya is scared of more things than you would think. Take directing: With almost every television and film project she does, she asks the director if she can come to set during the days that she’s not shooting, so she can observe different parts of the crew at work. But when I tell her that she sounds like she’s training herself for the job, she responds, “The only hurdle with directing is that it’s me, it’s not a character, and getting over the fear of not being good enough. When you watch someone like [Christopher] Nolan, or Luca [Guadagnino], it makes me think, ‘Who am I to think that I can do that?’ I sure hope I can grow up and just do it and not be so afraid.” She is also a fan of the theater, but has never done it professionally. “I’ve always been way too much of a scaredy-cat to get onstage,” she says. “But maybe one day, I’ll, again, stop being a chicken and get out there.”
On a misty April morning in New York, one of those spring days when the sun refuses to show itself, Zendaya is somehow at ease. She has been on a manic press tour, promoting the release of the film The Drama, mere weeks before the release of what’s expected to be the final season of Euphoria and only three months before the release of the soon-to-be summer events The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day—which will be followed by Dune: Part Three in December. This has been one of the busiest, most visible years of her career. “It’s going to be a long year, but what’s great is that I’m really proud of everything. I just really love my job,” she says. “But I think that after this, I’m going to have to take a little bit of a break.” Though, she adds, “As soon as I take a break, I start to go crazy. And I’m like, ‘I need to work.’”
Dress, Balmain.
She is curled up on a small beige couch in the corner of an art gallery and café in Brooklyn after going on a walk with her mother, Claire Stoermer, and friend Darnell Appling. The actor and producer looks cozy: She is dressed in a pale-yellow knit sweater and white trousers under a long khaki trench coat, and wears small gold earrings and black loafers. She has tied a chic blue bandanna over her hair. (And she has a gold band on her ring finger, but when asked if she can confirm the rumors that she and partner Tom Holland are married, she says: “No, I’m not going to do that. They’re always searching for something”—meaning the internet, one presumes.)
In The Odyssey, Zendaya takes on the role of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and she thinks she does share some of her character’s attributes. “In many ways, it feels very fitting that that would be the pairing for me,” she says. Despite only being 29, Zendaya is regarded as a kind of elder statesman in the industry, a veteran whom other actors respect and look to for guidance. She says that people have called her an old soul since she was a kid. “I don’t know what that is, I just feel like I’ve been here before,” she says. It makes sense: She has been a professional since she was a child, showing up to acting jobs to work nine-to-five, and spending most of her time with adults. “And in many ways, I’m an only child—all of my siblings are much older than me; the brother who’s closest in age to me was 16 when I was born,” she says. “So that means I spent a lot of time with my parents.” For the first six or so years of her life, Zendaya also spent a lot of time with her grandmother, who took care of her when her parents were working. “We would sit and hang out and watch Jerry Springer and make root beer floats. Take the bus and go get ice cream and walk around. So I guess the old lady in me was born from the beginning,” she says, laughing.
Top, Louis Vuitton. Earrings, Tiffany & Co.
Her grandmother used to tell her that she felt like a kid despite her age, and Zendaya now sees what she meant. “I think I do have wisdom to offer, but I also do still feel like a fucking kid. Like what the fuck, I’m about to be 30? I still feel like a child inside,” she says. Athena is also the goddess of war, and as a creative person putting out art while the United States wages war in the Middle East, Zendaya sees a need for greater empathy. “There’s a real heaviness, and a real responsibility to that. How much we lean into dehumanizing other people—that breaks my heart, that’s something I can’t get down with. Because I just feel we have a tendency to not see other people as human beings worthy of safety, of joy, of the same things that we’re also worthy of,” she says.
Her role in The Drama requires empathy from viewers, too. “I didn’t know what to feel,” she recalled about first reading the explosive script. She had her mother and a niece read it, too, so they could discuss the story. In the end, she was drawn to the difficulty of the character, and the way the film treats the darkness of its subject. “I am drawn to complicated characters who I have to earn the audience’s empathy and trust for,” she says. She saw a personal challenge in the project. “I want to expand the roles someone like me is allowed to do, or can do. As a Black woman, what I can do as an actress,” she adds. And she appreciated how the plague of school shootings in this country is handled in the film. “It’s sick. Sometimes when reality feels so disturbing, the only way to deal with it in an artistic way is through humor,” she says.
Top, Louis Vuitton.
Top, skirt, Diesel. Boots, Paris Texas.
Zendaya describes herself as shy by nature, and acting lets her roam outside of her comfort zone. “I feel less judgmental of myself because I’m someone else, and I get to try things and do things I probably would never do,” she says. “I think of certain scenes…I don’t yell. There’s very little that can provoke extreme emotion out of me in real life. And I often play characters who are not like that. It’s incredibly freeing. Because I’m like, if I’m not yelling at somebody in the scene, I’m never gonna yell at anybody!”
Her role in The Drama scared her. “A little fear is good,” she tells me. It pushes her artistically. Her role in Euphoria also scared her when she first took it on, and she says “it was quite an emotional return” to shoot the third season after a yearslong hiatus. “A lot of life has happened,” she says, describing it as like the nostalgic feeling of walking into your childhood bedroom, a “weird feeling.”
“I remember being on set for Euphoria; it was a night shoot at a ranch. I was so tired, but I was also learning my Chakobsa lines for Dune. And then I started writing out my lines to memorize for that quick turnaround trip I was going to make to Iceland [for The Odyssey],” she says. “It’s not like I have a lot of lines in The Odyssey, but I was working with Christopher Nolan! The most embarrassing thing in life would be messing up my lines, which did happen once.”
Shirt, pants, Acne Studios. Ring, Van Cleef & Arpels.
But Nolan sees it differently: “We would be in the maddest, craziest situations, just all of us fighting the elements, tearing our hair out, all these things going on, and she would sort of parachute in from her other job with this sense of true grace and poise.” He says he sought out Zendaya for the role specifically because of that “iconic” grace: “I mean, she’s literally playing a goddess; it’s a tall order. She’s a true movie star, but also an incredible actor.”
Matt Damon, her costar in The Odyssey, agrees. “Chris is known for being very circumspect. So when you do a take, it’s not like he says, ‘That was great.’ He’ll go, ‘Yep, good. Okay.’ And that is the equivalent of the greatest praise you could ever get,” Damon says. “Zendaya, on the other hand—there were takes where she did one thing, she did this amazing scene, and he said, ‘Cut.’ And then he went, ‘Perfect.’ And literally, Tom [Holland] and I were obsessed with this. She got a ‘perfect’? I’ve never even gotten a ‘great.’ She got a ‘perfect’? He and I bitched about it for the entire rest of the film. ‘Did you get anything today?’ ‘No, I got a “good”—moving on.’ ‘Yeah, me too.’
“So it was this amazing ability she had to come in and really put herself in there and blow everybody away, and then just go back to shooting Euphoria,” Damon continues. “Look, you forget, she and Tom are very young actors and very accomplished for how young they are, but they’re still in their 20s.” (And by the way, he adds: “I absolutely adore her and Tom together, and they deserve each other—they’re the two loveliest people.”)
Coat, Louis Vuitton. Bracelet, Tiffany & Co. Boots, Le Silla.
Zendaya has been open about going out for roles that are not just written with Black or mixed-race women in mind. “I don’t want any bounds on my creativity,” she tells me. She is feeling inspired and energized by seeing her friend Ayo Edebiri onstage in New York, and she is excited about her Ronnie Spector film, which she is producing and starring in. “It’s been a long time coming,” she says. She describes Spector, who was the lead singer of the ’60s girl group The Ronettes, as an “icon who never really got her due.” Barry Jenkins, who is directing, was her dream director for the project; she wants the film to be more experimental than a traditional biopic. “I just want to do my best job for her, and make her proud,” Zendaya says.
She worked with Holland on both The Odyssey and Brand New Day. They didn’t share scenes on the first film, so she was able to watch him on set. “I could have cried, I was so proud,” she says. “And then Spider-Man was a dream; I get to go to work every day with my best friend, the person that I love. We bring our dogs to work; it’s like a family affair. We grew up on those movies! It’s like coming home.”
Later that night, she had the New York premiere of The Drama, and next week she’ll be at the L.A. premiere of Euphoria. After that, she’s launching a womenswear collection for the running shoe and apparel brand On with her longtime stylist/image architect, Law Roach. She met Roach when she was 14, when he lived in Chicago and owned a vintage store, and their tastes have evolved together. “We love to try things, but it still has to make sense for me. In some ways, I have no particular aesthetic,” she says of her tendency to have a uniform in her daily life, while taking risks on the red carpet.
Shirt, pants, Acne Studios. Ring, Van Cleef & Arpels.
Zendaya is looking forward to taking a break to be in “auntie mode” and spending time with her nieces and nephews: going to school plays and football games and, like she did on a recent trip to her hometown of Oakland, where a lot of her family lives, helping a niece redecorate her bedroom. She likes to devise a project—her grandmother’s kitchen was another—when she visits so the family can come together. “I call my big brother and he brings his tools, and then it’s YouTube university and we just start doing stuff,” she says, laughing. Zendaya is close to her family, and they have her location on their phones since she is often on the road. “It’s just easier—‘Oh, she’s not responding because she’s in Budapest.’ So they know where I am, and what time zone,” she says. She also enjoys watching videos on painting restoration and carpet cleaning in her spare time; she finds them relaxing. The reality TV show Love Island helps with that, too.
While in Oakland, Zendaya and Holland also adopted another dog from a shelter, a pocket bully, bringing their total to three. “Logistically, it wasn’t probably the smartest idea,” she says. “But emotionally, it was. He’s a wonderful addition to our family. I saw his little face and I was like, ‘I can’t leave you behind.’”
Lead Image: Dress, Ferrari. Bracelet, ring, Van Cleef & Arpels. Boots, Paris Texas.
Hair by Coree Moreno for Oribe; makeup by Ernesto Casillas for Prada Beauty; manicure by Alex Jachno for Manicurist; set design by Marla Weinhoff at 11th House Agency; produced by Alexey Galetskiy Productions.
This story appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ELLE.