CINEMA
Zendaya: Everything you need to know about the actress: Movies, TV shows, family, partner and height
The Californian actress would have earned 10 million for films like ‘Rivals’ and ‘Dune’
Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman, or simply Zendaya, as she is known, counts her projects on the small and big screen as successes. She seems to have the Midas Touch right now. A former teenage Disney star, Zendaya has done better than many of her peers. She stars alongside Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist in a new psychological thriller Challengers, which goes on general release on Friday and is tipped to be one of the big box office smashes of the summer. She plays Tashi Duncan, a promising tennis player who is forced to give up her career after suffering a harrowing knee injury.
In other productions, she was one of the leading lights in Euphoria, and gained acclaim for her performances in Spider-Man: No Way Home with her partner Tom Holland and in Dune with Timothée Chalamet.
Film directors fight to obtain her services in the seventh art, although they don’t exactly come cheap. Good things come at a price as they say, and the 27-year-old actress commands a high fee these days - just ask the production team behind Challengers.
10 million dollar-cachet
According to a report in the prestigious magazine Variety, Zendaya has been expanding her cachet on the big screen. Chalamet received an astronomical sum of over $8 million for his role in last year’s blockbuster Wonka, and a slightly bigger fee for Dune: Part 2 which has grossed $697.5 million at the box office.
Challengers, which premieres Friday in theaters in the United States and in Europe, is expected to make somewhere between $12 million and $15 million in its opening weekend. The Luca Guadagnino-directed movie could even dethrone another of the films of the moment, Civil War, which has been the most viewed film of the past two weeks.
Challengers is an Amazon MGM Studios production that had a total cost of $55 million. A figure of which almost a fifth, 10 million, has been for Zendaya, who does the job of acting, and also producing.
Zendaya has been dating Tom Holland for almost three years, and publicly announced their relationship in November 2021. While they are in a stable, long-term relationship, both are focusing on their careers for now. Last year, Zendaya told Elle magazine: “Parts of my life, I accept, are going to be public. I can’t not be a person and live my life and love the person I love. But also, I do have control over what I choose to share. It’s about protecting the peace and letting things be your own but also not being afraid to exist. You can’t hide. That’s not fun, either. I am navigating it more than ever now.”
Another surprising thing about Zendaya is her height. She stands at statuesque 5 foot 10″ and often towers over her costars - especially when she wears high heels. “I always tell my fans that people are going to comment on your height regardless, so you might as well be as tall as possible and look good doing it!” she told People magazine in 2015.