Before Everyone Caught On

Since Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood video in 2015—that maximalist pop spectacle stuffed with famous women in tactical gear doing their best action-hero posturing—I’ve been a little bit in love with Zendaya. The video had about fifteen recognizable faces packed into it, all performing excitement, and she was the one I kept finding. Something about her didn’t fit the template. A kind of self-possession that read as strange in that context, stranger still because she was twenty-one and a Disney kid and should have been performing enthusiasm rather than just being interesting.

The Disney Channel thing is almost impossible to survive with your identity intact. Three seasons of Shake It Up, then the spy series K.C. Undercover—the kind of résumé that usually becomes a ceiling. She treated it more like a floor. By the time Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived in 2017, she was in a real film holding her own inside a franchise that size, and then The Greatest Showman the same year—a film I have complicated feelings about, but she was in it, and she was fine. The modelling work has been running alongside the acting the whole time, neither career swallowing the other.

She talks about fashion as self-expression—that’s what gives you power—which sounds like a press quote, which probably is a press quote, but it also sounds like something she actually means. And the evidence supports it. She moves through her own image as though she chose it deliberately rather than had it assigned, which in the pop culture industry, at twenty-two, is genuinely unusual. Most people at that level are either performing a version of themselves built by handlers or visibly fighting against it. She seems neither.

Spider-Man: Far From Home was coming. I suspected she’d be the most interesting thing in it. That low hum you get sometimes watching someone who isn’t quite famous enough yet for what they’re clearly about to become—I had that. I was keeping an eye on her.