I for one believed the widely-believed excuse for Zendaya skipping this year’s Met Gala: that she was too visible and she was going to be in everyone’s faces all year because of how many of her films are out in 2026. She already had The Drama (which is a box office success) and Euphoria’s final season. Then, this summer, she’ll have The Odyssey and the new Spider-man movie. Then in the fall/winter, she’ll have Dune 3. The year of Zendaya!! Anyway, Zendaya is one of Elle Magazine’s cover subjects for The Odyssey – you can see her cover profile here. She gets high praise from Christopher Nolan and Matt Damon, and she chats about working on all of these projects back-to-back. Some highlights:
The year of Zendaya: “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. 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.’”
Whether she’s married: 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.
Playing Athena, goddess of wisdom: “In many ways, it feels very fitting that that would be the pairing for me… I don’t know what that is, I just feel like I’ve been here before… 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. 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 feels like a kid though: “I think I do have wisdom to offer, but I also do still feel like a f–king kid. Like what the f–k, I’m about to be 30? I still feel like a child inside.”
On The Drama’s subject matter: “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.
Working on back-to-back projects: “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]. 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.”
Christopher Nolan on Zendaya: “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 on Zendaya: “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. 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.’”
Zendaya on watching Tom Holland work on ‘The Odyssey’: “I could have cried, I was so proud. 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.”
Now I’m a little bit obsessed with Nolan saying Zendaya is “perfect” too. I’m getting the impression that Nolan had a ball casting The Odyssey, and he had a list of actresses he wanted to work with, and Zendaya and Lupita were at the top of his list. I also get the impression that the men around Zendaya are always very impressed with her – I remember when they promoted Challengers, and Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor always talked about how hard she worked but that work wasn’t her whole life, and that gagged them. Robert Pattinson seems pretty gagged by her too. As for the rest of it… she is an old soul, but that’s because she’s a Virgo and because she spent so much time with her grandmother!
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, cover courtesy of Elle.
