It’s possible that if you go to the movies between now and December you’ll end up seeing a movie that features Zendaya. The 29-year-old American actress has released, this year alone, the finale of the series Euphoria; in may, the dramathis saturday The odysseyon July 29 the new installment of Spider-Man and, in December, the third part of Dune. Appointments are piling up on her calendar while, before turning 30, she has managed to make Disney the platform that has turned her into an auteur film performer, franchise face, producer, fashion icon or simply a woman who finds in each film record an opportunity to test herself and consolidate her place in the industry.
The headline for the first part of Zendaya’s life could be something like this: from Disney girl to global star. A narrative arc that is too elaborate to fit into a career that, consciously and autonomously, the actress has built with tools and collaborators that escape the logic that has marked the prodigy girls. She once said that her goal was to be a mix of Oprah Winfrey, Beyoncé and Shonda Rhimes.
That woman now appears in a winged dress at the premiere of The odyssey in New York and manages to look like the protagonist of a film in which she barely appears, signed by Christopher Nolan, shot in IMAX, almost three hours long, with a budget of 250 million dollars. She comes from a mixed-race family from Oakland, California. Due to her height, she thought she was going to dedicate herself to sports, but her mother’s work in the theater and the Hannah Montana series directed her steps in another direction. “My father left his job as a teacher to make my dream possible. My mother stayed in Oakland because she had two jobs, teaching and working at night at the California Shakespeare Theater. Those jobs paid for all of our round-trip car trips during the year I was casting in Los Angeles,” said the actress, who began working at the age of 13, in 2010, on the series. Shake It Upfrom Disney.
From that day on, he chained children’s and youth series until 2017, when he began the saga Spider-Man y the great showmanby filmmaker Michael Gracey. He combined his jump to the cinema with the last of his Disney series, K.C. Undercoverin which she also served as producer and among her demands was that part of the cast, specifically her family, be racialized. “There are other things that a girl can be besides a singer and dancer. I wanted KC to be a brainiac. For boys, and not just girls, to watch the series and dream of being like her,” the actress explained in an interview in Vogue.
He was 18 years old and confronted Disney. That same year, he appeared at the Oscars with dreadlocks and an American television presenter criticized the hairstyle, saying it “smelled like patchouli and marijuana.” Zendaya responded through a statement she published on Instagram and Twitter, her natural communication channels: “It is an outrageously offensive stereotype,” and added, “there is already enough criticism of African-American hair in society without the need for ignorant people to judge others by the texture of their hair.” Mattel launched a Barbie doll inspired by that look, dreadlocks included, and he had not yet shot a single film.
“This is how change happens,” the actress acknowledged over time. Her stylist Law Roach even placed the response to her hair at a historical level by stating, in 2024, that it gave rise to the Crown Act (the law that prohibits discrimination for Afro hairstyles in the United States, since 2019). “It changed the way black people’s hair was accepted in schools and at work,” Roach said.
That same year, she criticized a magazine for using Photoshop “to change the body of a 19-year-old girl,” and she also published the original photos from that session on her social networks. Zendaya is not a speaker for certain causes, in fact, she rejects the label of activist. “It’s a lifestyle, causes to which you dedicate your life and I don’t deserve that title. I’m just a person with a heart who tries to do things as best as possible,” he responded to the magazine. InStyle. His imprint is in a daily life that generates a different impact than public demonstrations at awards ceremonies, for example he uses his profiles on networks to raise awareness about mental health.
In 2019, Zendaya managed to break away from the Disney label when the first season of the series premiered. Euphoria. “There was something I couldn’t get out of my head. She had a vulnerability at certain moments, and then a real toughness,” Sam Levinson, director of the series, said of her. The actress was still at Disney, she participated in the reality dancing Dancing with the Stars, so the character of Rue Bennett, that teenager from a suburb in the United States hooked on drugs, did not seem part of the script prescribed for the actress. Despite her team’s reluctance, she read the script and accepted. “I had a lot of fears, even before I knew this script existed, about what I was going to do next and what I was looking for. I had all these ideas in my head about what the next step should be, and there was nothing that I felt I connected with… everything just wasn’t going right,” he declared at the time.
At only 22 years old he was already in the middle of that crossroads: leave or continue with his Disney life. Euphoria premiered on HBO in June 2019, co-produced by A24, and the role of Rue earned Zendaya her first Emmy nomination. She won and became the youngest winner in that category. “Huge” was the adjective that has followed him since then in many of his interpretations. A validation of the criticism that came to him for a role in which not even the glitter makeup of the first two seasons managed to lead back to frippery.
Fame with a hoodie
Zendaya was already a respected performer and apparently all she needed was a hoodie. Therefore, if her career is measured in strictly viral terms, each of her appearances on a red carpet generates a response of such impact that the immediate conclusion is simple: Zendaya has achieved that stellar category. Thanks to her alliance with the stylist Law Roach, whom she took out of a second-hand clothing store when she was 14 years old, they have made the so-called method dressing (resort to styles that underline, without leaving room for interpretation, the theme of the film or series being promoted) part of your most recognizable brand.
To The odyssey has taken from the Schiaparelli catwalk a sculptural dress with LED lights, an Alexander McQueen archive piece crowned with a Philipp Tracey mask that was traced on the Eiffel Tower behind her, as well as a winged suit that the desired Matières Fécales house has kept in the closet of the actress and her stylist for more than a year.
The capacity of this artistic duo for narrative marketing, image construction and mastery of the digital cycle is a value that any thinking person behind the promotion strategy of a cultural product craves. Everything has to be an event, even if its fixation in memory is limited to the half hour of the walk along the carpets and its subsequent temporal journey through the networks.
Thus, through fashion it has also achieved a certain independence in Hollywood, to be present in different areas – one of the dogmas of these times – one must be present – and to consolidate itself as a reference in fashion.
When the analysis focuses on his audiovisual career, the questions branch out. Is Zendaya capable of supporting a film or series on her own in terms of box office and acting? Or are the so-called franchises with an already consolidated IP the ones that are doing that job for her? The box office figures of the sagas of Spider-Man y Duneand those expected from The odysseywith a budget of 250 million dollars, are misleading when compared to the tickets it has sold with Malcolm y Marie (there is almost no record because it was released during a pandemic); Rivals (2024), by Luca Guadagnino, grossed more than $95 million, according to Box Office Mojo; and the drama has exceeded 132 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
His foray into what can be considered more auteur cinema—there is little left of independent these days—is progressing and it is not always about ensemble films in which other members of the cast help him carry part of the weight. All in all, Zendaya’s massive cult has earned her a net worth of $40 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Now he announces a break. Although she has been on public display since childhood, she keeps repeating: “That is a part of this career that terrifies me.” She defines herself as shy and introverted. He talks about his family as his reference, tells anecdotes about his nephews, while at the same time he has built a hard layer of perimeter secrecy around his personal life. She has married Tom Holland, an actor and co-star in several of her films. The public knows this because he has missed the phrase “my wife” in several interviews. There is no further trace in their statements, although their relationship is an inevitable component of the public conversation. And despite the AI’s insistence on releasing all kinds of fake images of their wedding, including one in which the bride and groom are accompanied by all the actors who have donned the Spider-Man hood.
He’s leaving, he says these days of promotion The odysseyto “do nothing, worry about my things.” “This job is sometimes a whirlwind, you change cities every second, your brain tries to be everywhere,… I am very grateful, I wouldn’t change anything, but sometimes you have to disappear for a while,” she explained. It will do so at the end of the year, when the third part of Dune. She will say goodbye leaving a trail of dozens of images of her outfits for this crossing the networks so that upon his return some of the viral dust allows him to take a new step in his career.