Is ‘Challengers’ Zendaya’s Movie Star Moment? (2024)

With Challengers, the mononymous former child star Zendaya has reached a clear turning point in a film career that somehow exists on several timelines at once. On one hand, it feels like she’s been some kind of a star for ages; she did her first Spider-Man movie back in 2017, seven years ago, and was a Disney Channel kid before that. (She even has a little-discussed 2013 album – self-titled, naturally.) Yet her work as a movie-star has also been neatly contained: Of her eight live-action movies, three are Spider-Mans (where she plays the love interest, albeit a feisty and smart one), two are Dunes (where she plays the love interest, albeit a feisty and determined one), and one is The Greatest Showman (where she plays the second lead’s love interest, albeit… you get the idea). The remaining two – the only movies where she plays an adult and a leading role – are (a terrible pandemic-made Netflix two-hander) and Challengers, which she also produced, and hired Luca Guadagnino to direct.

Of course, Zendaya has also won multiple Emmys for playing the lead on the HBO series Euphoria, which has taken up some of her busy schedule and served as a gateway to more grown-up parts. But on the show itself, she plays a teenager – uncertainty over how to handle its now-adult cast seems to be helping delay the show’s third season – and so the 27-year-old actress feels more grown-up onscreen in Challengers than we’ve yet seen her, despite beginning the movie’s timeline as a recent high-school graduate.

Zendaya’s wealth of child-star poise and comparable paucity of adult experiences has led to some debate over her effectiveness as a leading lady, like this frank conversation over at Vulture, wherein critic Angelica Jade Bastién wonders if it may be precisely Zendaya’s Disney-machine-tooled professionalism that detracts from her ability to play “sensuality.” In the same discussion, critic Matt Zoller Seitz notes that Zendaya tends to carry herself like a pop star in the vein of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift – meaning, presumably, that only a certain (and perhaps calculated) portion of regular-human relatability can make it past a larger-than-life remove to connect with her adoring fans.

I think both of these aspects to Zendaya’s star persona are at play in Challengers – and part of what makes her performance in the film so effective. She does exhibit some degree of remove the role of Tashi Duncan, a generational tennis talent who is sidelined into a coach/Svengali role by a college injury and a subsequent marriage to merely excellent player Art (Mike Faist). The movie flips back and forth in time, and we see Tashi toy with the idea of relationships with Art and his best friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor). Early on, when Tashi (or the movie) flirts (however abstractly) with the idea of a threesome, there’s an insouciant flirtiness to her considerations; later, they seem more strategic. Tashi sees tennis as a relationship, and we start to wonder if it’s the only kind of relationship that truly interests her, at least among adults. (Later in the movie, we see her as a young mother, though much of the day-to-day parental load falls on her own mom.) If she can’t communicate by playing the game anymore, maybe she can play by manipulating the game.

Art and Patrick both pursue Tashi because they both appear to agree that she’s more or less the most beautiful girl they’ve ever seen, and of course Zendaya is beautiful. But Tashi also seems too tough to fully know, so there’s a competitive fire in getting to be the boy that might find her way into her heart and unlock some kind of deeper affection and understanding. By conveying this fixation through Tashi’s steady gaze and lack of immediately ingratiating warmth, Zendaya projects a kind of coiled mystery that a lot of actresses her age might not dare engage in.

This is a major unifying factor across almost all of Zendaya’s movie performances so far: They don’t tend to focus on gestures of endearment – the kind of likability-mongering that actresses, especially Black actresses, might feel obligated to perform to make sure they look down-to-earth and relatable enough to oversensitive audiences. The Spider-Man movies, where her MJ is sardonic and deadpan, play her aloofness as comic; the Dune movies play her skepticism as part of her idealism. Both posit that the right skinny white boy could lower those defenses (even if, as with Dune, he betrays her in the end). Challengers is essentially about that process, without allowing for an easy love-interest-arc payoff.

That’s why it’s hard for me to buy Tashi as a motivational prize in the boys’ story, as some have described it. In a way, her character arc, examined chronologically, looks more like speculation over what would have happened if Zendaya had been somehow taken out of stardom before she had a chance to make the transition from Disney Channel to movies, and had to pivot to directing instead. That dovetails with today’s biggest pop stars, who feel more like auteurs than ever, even when they’re not literally the credited directors on their own music videos or concert films (and they often are).

Malcolm & Marie, self-indulgent as it was, also positioned Zendaya as director-adjacent, writing her character as an understandably standoffish muse to a bloviating filmmaker played by John David Washington. It gave her a lot of talk (and, like Challengers, often zeroed in lovingly on her body during that talk), but ultimately went in circles. In Challengers, the endgame of Tashi’s manipulations aren’t entirely clear, but the movie reaches a clear and deeply satisfying exclamation point – one that emanates from Zendaya, not her male co-stars. Some of Guadagnino’s past movies have felt flaky and fritter-y, even when they featured a presence as distinctive as Tilda Swinton. The weight of Zendaya’s fame – her name-brand recognition despite so few genuine starring vehicles – brings Challengers down to the ground. It remains to be seen whether Zendaya has the range of a truly great actor. But she certainly has the paradoxical mystique — both glamorously unknowable and inviting — to become a major star.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.