Zendaya was excited to play something beside a high schooler in Challengers

Zendaya is one of the biggest names in Hollywood right now, but outside of her work with Sam Levinson, she hasn’t had much chance to prove her versatility as a serious actor. 2024 has finally provided the opportunity for her to prove herself as an artist and a movie star with Dune 2 and Challengers. What sets the films apart is that she actually gets to play a grown-up: “I’m always in a high school somewhere,” she says in a new interview with British Vogue. So Challengers “was refreshing. And it was also kind of scary, because I was like, I hope people buy me as my own age, or maybe a little bit older, because I have friends that have kids, or are having kids.”

The 27-year-old—who also produced Challengers—expressed a similar sentiment in a recent Vogue “get ready with me” video: “People see me as a teenager, since I was a teenager for so long. This is really finally me being able to play a woman closer to my own age,” she said. “Well, technically I do still play a teenager at some points, but then she grows up.”

This isn’t to say Zendaya is contemptuous of her past work as a child actor—at a recent press conference, she joked that her Disney Channel series K.C. Undercover prepared her for Challengers. “No, I’m kidding. You know, listen, the Disney stuff really does… it’s a good training ground.” Still, her adult perspective on child stardom is not wholly positive. “I have complicated feelings about kids and fame and being in the public eye, or being a child actor. We’ve seen a lot of cases of it being detrimental,” she tells British Vogue. “And I think only now, as an adult, am I starting to go, ‘Oh, OK, wait a minute: I’ve only ever done what I’ve known, and this is all I’ve known.’ I’m almost going through my angsty teenager phase now, because I didn’t really have the time to do it before. I felt like I was thrust into a very adult position: I was becoming the breadwinner of my family very early, and there was a lot of role-reversal happening, and just kind of becoming grown, really.”

The young star admits she can’t fully enjoy an accomplishment like leading her first truly adult film because of the constant pressure she’s been under for years. “I’m very tense,” she says, “and I think that I carry that from being a kid and never really having an opportunity to just try shit. And I wish I went to school.”