The honour capped off an extraordinary run of success for the graceful, 1.78-metre mononymous beauty, fresh from rave reviews for her performance in 2021’s Oscar-nominated sci-fi epic Dune. Last year also saw her appear in another blockbuster, Spider-Man: No Way Home, following which it was revealed that she and co-star Tom Holland had fallen in love, a relationship that is still ongoing.

Currently filming Dune: Part Two, in which she now plays the female lead, the 26-year-old is arguably the hottest young actress in Hollywood.

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Building Euphoria

“Finding a passion, finding something that gives you purpose … is an extraordinary thing,” she explains. In the aftermath of her second Emmy win, she spoke of how deeply the gritty drama series has affected her.

“Euphoria has given me a tremendous amount of purpose. I really, really love what I do … and the amount of stories and messages I have received since Euphoria has come out is the whole reason why we do this.

“I love Rue and care about her deeply. I also care about the people who care about her, because I think many of them share her story of addiction and sobriety, many of them share a lot of her emotional disorders … and many of them have felt this deep connection with Rue and have shared their very painful stories with me.”

Euphoria is a sexually explicit series that airs on HBO, with Rue a young woman battling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and drug addiction. In portraying her character’s harrowing struggles, Zendaya was forced to plunge herself into difficult psychological territory to evoke the extreme range of emotions that Rue experiences.

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“Euphoria deals with pain and inner darkness, the series absolutely does not want to give life lessons, rather it is a story to share difficult moments and make us feel less alone. If you can love her, then you can love someone that is struggling with the same thing, and maybe have a greater understanding of the pain they’re facing. That is often out of their control. So for me, that is the most important thing.”

Adds Zendaya: “For a lot of people, Rue was a version of themselves, whether it be their sobriety journey, or their mental health journey, whatever the case may be. I think so many people connected to that, and I became the catalyst to connecting those two people, I just got to be the storyteller in the middle. And it felt great, but I’ve continued to feel very grateful for that responsibility to feel connected to these people that feel connected to her, because I know I am too.”

Falling for Spider-Man

It was Holland who broke the news of their off-screen relationship in an interview last year, declaring that they “love each other very much”. Zendaya, however, admitted that in an ideal world she would have preferred to have kept their love affair as secret as say, Spider-Man’s identity.

“It was quite strange and weird and confusing and invasive,” she said. “The equal sentiment (we share) is just that when you really love and care about somebody, some moments or things, you wish were your own …. I think loving someone is a sacred thing and a special thing and something that you want to deal with and go through and experience and enjoy among the two people that love each other.”

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Early days: Disney, modelling and music

Born Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman, the actress grew up in Oakland, California, where her African-American father and mother of German/Irish ancestry both work as schoolteachers. Recognising her gift for putting on self-styled talent shows for her parents, they soon began nurturing her ambitions.

She started out as a child model for Macy’s before making her acting debut at the age of 13 on Shake It Up, the Disney series where she starred as Rocky Blue opposite Bella Thorne’s CeCe Jones. Zendaya credits her parents for having dedicated a large part of their lives to putting her on the road to Hollywood success.

“It took quite some time before I became financially independent and could help my parents. I am so grateful and proud to have reach this point and I couldn’t have done it without the total support of my family,” she adds.

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Zendaya admits to feeling privileged to have benefited from the kind of stable family life and solid upbringing that Rue and other characters in Euphoria would likely never enjoy. “My parents educated me in a very open and honest way and I am convinced that this is the best way to raise children,” she continues. “Whenever I asked them a question – no matter what subject – I was always given an honest answer.”

She was honest in turn with millions of Disney fans who looked upon her as a role model – not only young black women, but young women around the world – when she decided to focus on her acting rather than her initial career in pop music, which has seen her release 10 solo singles since 2011, as well as collaborations, an EP and 2013’s self-titled album.

“I feel I owe it to all those people and especially the young women who have followed me and supported me during my career from the time I was starting out on Disney,” she says. “I want to continue to be a woman who paves the way for other young women.”

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Zendaya was keenly aware that taking on a series as controversial as Euphoria might have alienated her fervently loyal fan base. Instead, the series not only emerged as one of the most popular of its kind, but also forced her to raise her game when it came to putting herself through very difficult moments as Rue.

“Many of my fans are the same age as me: they grew up with me, they watched me on Disney, and Euphoria is their story. We need stories like this where young people can watch characters who are very close to their own reality and they can understand how certain choices will take you down the wrong road,” she adds.

Taking risks: Malcolm & Marie

In the midst of shooting Euphoria, Zendaya took on another challenge in Malcolm & Marie, a gritty relationship drama that plays out over the course of a single evening, and marked one of the most daring films to emerge out of the pandemic era when it first aired on Netflix in January 2021.

The story of a disintegrating marriage, with Zendaya starring opposite John David Washington (of Tenet fame), the film grew directly out of the Covid-related production shutdown on season two of Euphoria. With the entire state of California in lockdown, Zendaya asked Euphoria creator Sam Levinson whether they could somehow shoot a film under the restrictions, which directly led to the project’s audacious theatre-esque, single-location conceit.

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“My feeling is that if things don’t feel risky then they’re not right,” added Zendaya. “Even with Euphoria … it didn’t feel as risky to me as it probably seemed because I felt so connected to it and there was no way I wasn’t going to do it.

“It felt like I was part of something special and there was a story to be told and I was just lucky to be telling it.”