In March, when the world stopped, Zendaya, a mononymous fashion icon and the busiest young star in Hollywood, had nowhere to go and nothing waiting for her. So she decided to try her hand at painting watercolors.
“This is some real corny sh*t, but I started this,” says Zendaya, holding a sketchbook up to her laptop camera. “It's a journal or art-book thing that my friend Hunter [Schafer] from Euphoria got me, actually. My new thing for myself is to try not to be so damn controlling all the time and just paint. Just whatever the f*ck comes out, that's what comes out.”
She flips the book open to show me her first painting. It is…a watercolor figure of a naked, faceless woman who looks like she's on fire. Her body is curvy, with co*ke-bottle dimensions. Her skin is mauve and striking, and she's surrounded by a yellow-gold amber. There's a suggestion of a neck, but there's nothing where her head would normally be, disintegrating from the shoulders up into a smolder of flames.
“She's a little fire lady,” Zendaya explains calmly. “That's kind of the thing, right? I don't know where this is going to go, but I'm going to just do it and see what happens.”
Between the generation of Disney Channel fans, the Marvel devotees, the Euphoria evangelists—and between the runway shows, magazine covers, and talk show interviews—it's hard to think of anyone as omnipresent in Hollywood as Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman. (She dropped the rest from her stage name early in her career because she thought it sounded cool, like Prince.) (She was right.) It's nighttime in Atlanta, where she's calling from. She's been living there while filming the next Spider-Man movie, renting a house, socializing within a small circle that includes her assistant and her costars. She's grateful to be working again. In early spring she was getting ready to film the second season of Euphoria—the neon-dunked HBO drama about a half-dozen confused high schoolers—when the rug was pulled out from under her and the show's return was pushed back a year. And Dune, the sci-fi epic she costars in with Timothée Chalamet, got pushed tentatively to this October. In the Before Time, when she'd finish her other gigs—The Greatest Showman, the first Tom Holland Spider-Man film—she could return to her day job on the Disney Channel show K.C. Undercover, on which she played a teenage spy. But this year was different. “It was the first time since I was 13 that I didn't go back to something,” Zendaya says, her head resting in her hands. “There was no structure.”
Jacket, $325, and hat, $145, by Post-Imperial. Shirt, $790, pants, $1,390, belt, $445, necklace, $375, and bracelet, $1,595, by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Boots, $198, by Timberland. Socks, $115, by The Elder Statesman. Watch, $4,250, and earrings (price upon request) by Bulgari.
He goes on: “She's very protective, rightfully so. And if she doesn't nail something or feel it on take one, she has a tendency to get very self-critical, which only further inhibits the release of emotion. So throughout the first year of Euphoria, we spent a lot of time trying to break down those barriers.” On that particular night, they rescheduled the scene for later. When they tried again the next day, and those emotional barriers finally broke down, Zendaya was transcendent: As Marie, she talked in menacing tones about what relapsing would feel like, what caving in to the darkness would mean for herself, Malcolm's script, their relationship. The material is raw and sensitive, and Zendaya wielded it with an almost malevolent unpredictability. She flashes a knife to make her point; Washington basically recoils watching her.
Now she's learning how to navigate her anxiety and her simultaneous desire to be in control of every impulse. She's still growing into a more fully realized version of herself, both as an artist and as a person, and learning how to manage expectations. Part of that is just being in your early 20s: Feeling pushed and pulled in a million different directions. Feeling the pressure to make every prediction, or projection, about you—whether it's from your parents, your peers, your friends—feel real.
