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Is Zendaya the Leading Lady We’ve Been Looking for?
Two critics face off about the actor’s Challengers performance and debate whether she knows how to serve onscreen as well as on the red carpet.
This week, she finally assumes her proper place in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers as Tashi, an ultracompetitive former tennis prodigy whose truncated career does nothing to deter fellow players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) from obsessing over her. As critic Matt Zoller Seitz writes in his recent essay on the actor, “Like so many movies built around the charisma of their stars, Challengers is … a film about how people can’t help being in love with Zendaya.” He sees in her the same kind of power exhibited by a young Julia Roberts, whose face held the camera in a death grip. In her review of Challengers she writes that the actor is “treated as the film’s gravitational force even though she’s playing a sketch of a woman.” While she admires Zendaya’s poise on the red carpet, onscreen, “The charisma and intensity just aren’t there.”
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