Why lockdown gave Zendaya an identity crisis and how Malcolm & Marie helped her come back

Zendaya reveals how she has faced some tough questions and how her Euphoria mentor helped her with the role of a lifetime.

Like countless other actors and artists, Zendaya’s livelihood dried up last year when the pandemic shut down television and film productions around the world.

But for the former teen star who got her start in Disney kids comedies including Shake It Up and K.C. Undercover before progressing to blockbuster roles in The Greatest Showman and Spider-Man: Homecoming and then last year becoming the youngest winner of the Prime time Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series for her electrifying turn as fast-living, drug-abusing teenager in Euphoria, it came with an unexpected, additional cost.

The now 24-year-old had been acting for so much of her life and with so much success, that she barely knew who she was without it any more, prompting her to take a good look in the mirror once it was suddenly taken away. To help fill the gap, she took up painting watercolours, and she also took the reflective time-out as an opportunity to count her blessings.

“I have been working since I was 13 years old so I don’t really know what life is like when I am not doing it,” she says via Zoom call from Atlanta, where she is reprising her role as MJ in the third, as-yet untitled Spider-Man film with Tom Holland.

Zendaya and John David Washington as the title characters in Malcolm & Marie.

“And I didn’t realise how crucial it was literally to the fabric of my being and that this is who I am. So, I was like ‘what am I even like if I am not doing this? What makes me happy?’. “That was definitely something I had to learn and understand a little bit about myself and also really lean more into the gratitude that I have for my job. To be able to do this for a living, I am so lucky that this gets to be my job and that I have a job.”

Even so, she remained restless. The US shutdown happened the day before she was due to start filming the second season of Euphoria with creator Sam Levinson, with whom she had developed a close bond over the past few years. She describes him as her “creative lighthouse” and credits him with helping keeping her sane during the difficult period, so it was only natural she would turn to him in a bid to create something out of nothing professionally.

“This stemmed from a conversation I had with Sam in quarantine and I asked him if he could maybe write something for me to do in quarantine,” she says. “I’ll do anything … and we can shoot it at my house.”

The result was Malcolm & Marie, a searing examination of a relationship in crisis, filmed in black and white and entirely in one location (they created a COVID-safe bubble with just 22 cast and crew in the Northern California city of Carmel, the only place in the state allowing shoots on private properties without a permit) and written specifically with its two actors, Zendaya and John David Washington, in mind.

Zendaya as Rue Bennett in HBO/BINGE drama, Euphoria. Picture: Supplied/HBO

Washington plays a hot-shot director riding high following the success of his new film and Zendaya is his girlfriend and muse, whom he has forgotten to thank at the premiere, exposing fissures in an already tense and sometimes volatile bond as the events play out over the course of a single night. It’s often uneasy viewing — and by its very nature more art house than multiplex — but both actors’ performances have earned rave reviews and put them at least at the fringe of awards conversations.

“As Sam was writing it, he only saw John David so he just wrote these characters for us and he would call me after he would write pages and read them to me and we’d talk about it for hours and that’s really the inception of it,” Zendaya says. “It just really happened in this beautiful authentic way.”

Washington, on the same Zoom call from his home in LA, says the approach came at exactly the right time. He was also having something of a professional, COVID-induced existential crisis and recognised the unique practical circumstances that led to the opportunity — limited cast, crew and locations — also made for a once in a lifetime role at a time he was glad to have any role.

Zendaya winning her Best Actress in a Drama Emmy last year. Picture: Arena

“I was not knowing if I would be able to act, when I would be able to act again,” he says. “Not knowing if I would be able to say something and the fear of ‘I am not even going to get the chance to sculpt my career the way I want — oh my God, this is crazy’.

“And then along comes this thing which was exactly what I wanted to do. I was thinking ‘if I do this, I don’t even know who’s going to see it, but it doesn’t matter’. I didn’t care about anything else — besides safety. I just thought let’s get it safe, let’s get it done and if this is just for us and not for the masses, then so be it. It was a very selfish reaction – it was ‘I have to do this for me, personally’.”

Washington, the son of Oscar-winner and Hollywood great Denzel, is coming off the back of Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending action-thriller Tenet, one of the few blockbusters released in the COVID era, to mixed reviews and middling box office results. And if all was right with the world, Zendaya would now be gracing our screens as part of Denis Villeneuve’s ambitious and eagerly-anticipated film adaptation of Dune, which has now been postponed to later in the year. Malcolm & Marie is about as far from backwards car chases and giant CGI sandworms as it could possibly be, but Zendaya says its dialogue and emotion heavy content is a happy result of the only way it could be made safely rather than a reaction to their previous blockbuster roles.

John David Washington in Christopher Nolan’s action-thriller, Tenet.

“We had to do this a certain way to make sure that it was safe,” she says. “So, Sam wrote it with that in mind, knowing it would only be two people and one location. With that being said — I think it accidentally became this dream role. I often say it became this actor’s dream in the sense of being able to be with one person in one space.

“It’s a tough thing to tackle but it’s also exciting and a kind of role or opportunity that you search forever for, to be able to do something like this. It probably wouldn’t have been made if we didn’t do it on our own because who would think that a black and white two-hander is a good idea?”

Malcolm & Marie screens in a limited cinema release from tomorrow and streams on Netflix from February 5