Culture Wars/Current Controversies

The Coiled Ferocity of Zendaya

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When Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz first encountered Zendaya, she was starring in Disney fare that appealed more to his kids. She didn’t make any impression on him, he admits, until he saw HBO’s Euphoria, where she “displayed that movie-star trick of getting you to care about a character, no matter how much she lied to people or degraded herself.” By the time Zendaya was theme-dressing for the Challengers red carpet, she’d put popular culture in a stranglehold and shifted Matt’s conception of her completely. He likens her now to Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, and Will Smith 30 years ago, the kinds of lead actors who never disappear into a role but manage to sell you on their fantasy with tiny, singular decisions. “We will give a star anything if we enjoy being around them,” Matt writes in this appraisal of what exactly makes Zendaya work so well onscreen, “if we are given the space to find ourselves in their impassive stares and unexpected silences.”

—Katherine Brooks, deputy editor, Vulture

The Coiled Ferocity of Zendaya Challengers is the ultimate example to date of what has become a distinctively Zendaya screen energy.

Photo: Pari Dukovic for New York Magazine
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