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or months, it’s been raining in L.A. But the first
day of spring dawns bright and clear. As I make
my way to Zendaya’s house in the San Fernando
Valley, wildflowers, nourished by the downpour,
sprout along the roadside in fistfuls of orange
and purple, and everyone—everyone—seems
to be leaning out of their car windows to snap shots. It’s a
moment for stopping and smelling the roses, so to speak, and
I’m expecting to find Zendaya doing some version of that. It’s
her first day off after a season of breakneck work, toggling
between the splashy debut of her TommyxZendaya collection
in Paris, photo shoots for Lancôme—the 22-year-old recent-
ly became the brand’s youngest global ambassador—and
filming HBO’s gritty new series Euphoria, in which “Z,” as
everyone involved with the show calls her, plays the lead role
of Rue, a recovering and relapsing young drug addict. Surely
Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman will be lazing about,
maybe soaking up rays by the side of her pool.
Instead, she jokes when I arrive, she’s taken yet another
job. “I’m an Uber driver now,” she says as she unlocks the
massive black SUV parked outside her garage. Her car is in
the shop, she explains with a shake of
her shower-wet hair, so she’s rented this
gargantuan thing for the purpose of
picking up her half-sister Kizzi’s two
daughters from school. She’s in a hurry
but doesn’t seem like it; she tucks her
oversize button-down into her jeans
in a leisurely, offhand way, and pours
her miniature schnauzer, Noon, into a
bed in the backseat. He curls up with-
out complaint, and just like that, we’re
back on the road, headed to a nearby
middle school. Zendaya likes to drive
fast. “This’ll make her nuts,” she says,
anticipating the pickup of twelve-
year-old Imani. “I’m going to honk
the horn really loud, a bunch of times,
and watch—she’ll be so embarrassed.”
Tweens mill about outside the school,
blissfully unaware of the presence of a
superstar many of them likely follow on
Instagram. Honk. Imani, eyes glued to
her phone, looks up. Honk-honk-honk. Zendaya laughs as
her niece shoots us a stormy glare. “Imani likes to pretend
she doesn’t love me,” she says. “But she does.” “I hate you,”
Imani says, not meaning it, as she slides into the seat beside
Noon. And we’re off, racing to Burbank to collect Niece #2.
Zendaya asks Imani about her day. Silence from the back-
seat. “Now, that I remember from school,” she says. “That
thing of getting home and saying, Oh, nothing happened, I
didn’t learn anything, my life is so boring, leave me alone.”
Zendaya left her traditional school when she was about Imani’s
age, moving from her childhood home of Oakland to Hol-
lywood and a mini-classroom on the set of the Disney series
Shake It Up, where she worked with a tutor handpicked by her
parents (Kazembe Ajamu and Claire Stoermer, both former
teachers). “The funny thing is, here I am, working on a show
where I play a high school student, and it’s like—at that age,
everything is happening, all the time. It’s all coming at you.”
Imani at last pipes up from the backseat. “I was telling
you what happened today,” she exclaims. Zendaya and I
exchange a confused look. “I was doing it in sign language!”
OK, tell me, Zendaya says, glancing in the rearview mirror
as she pulls up to a red light. Imani, with a wry smile, spells
out “N-O-T-H-I-N-G.”
Euphoria is a hand grenade. Loosely based on the Israeli
series of the same name, the show delivers a kaleidoscopic,
hyperbolic depiction of contemporary American high
school life, where the youth of today are formed in a crucible
of social media, online porn, and easy access to drugs of
all kinds. The series, which begins this month, comes from
executive producer Drake and showrunner Sam Levinson,
and like Levinson’s feature film, the Sundance darling
Assassination Nation, it moves at the clip of a Twitter feed.
At first blush, Rue, Zendaya’s character, would seem a role
for her Shake It Up costar Bella Thorne, who has cultivated
a wild-child persona since leaving the Disney fold. Yet it was
a photo of polished, self-possessed, avowedly abstemious
Zendaya that Levinson pinned to his mood board as he was
developing the show. “There’s a way Z
can vacillate between seeming extremely
tough and extremely vulnerable, and it’s
all in her face,” Levinson explains. “She
can flip on a dime. I felt like, That’s the
person who can channel this character,
and her mix of madness and sweetness.
It was an instinct.”
Whatever opinion you’ve formed of
Zendaya, whether you grew up watch-
ing the Disney Channel or just took
note of her in recent years—tracking
the daring looks she wears on the red
carpet, or how she lights up the latest
reboot of the Spider-Man franchise
(the new installment, Spider-Man: Far
from Home, in which she returns as Pe-
ter Parker’s wisecracking pal Michelle,
opens in July)—Euphoria will upend
your assumptions. Dressed in point-
edly unglamorous, androgynous togs,
anxiety-prone Rue shambles through
her days in search of calm and connection and, top priority
of all, a high that can quiet her gyrating mind. Levinson
was smart to cast against type: Zendaya is so innately
grounded that she makes Rue a reliable guide through a
chaotic world.
“Obviously, there’s not much in my own experience of
being a teen that I could draw on, especially when it comes
to struggling with addiction,” Zendaya admits. “My policy
is, when in doubt: Ask Sam. Because Sam’s gone through all
that, and, you know... basically, he’s Rue.”
Levinson laughs when I repeat this to him. “Yeah, that’s
about right,” he acknowledges. “But I’m not sure Z’s giving
herself enough credit. Like, she and I will be talking about
a scene, and I’ll tell her about something that happened
to me, and then when we start filming, she interprets
what I’ve said in this totally unexpected, sometimes even
frightening way.”
“Obv iousl y, I’ve
got a platform”—
about 55 million
people follow Zendaya
on Instagram—“but
I also know, don’t just
post whatever.
You’ve got to listen.
Talking is important.
Walking the talk is
important, too”
