Zendaya‘s Challengers press tour fashion continues to serve! The style icon and movie star, 27, selected a rose pink and black lace ball gown to attend the Los Angeles premiere of her sports-drama film. The Vera Wang dress featured a split black and pink tulle skirt and a lace bodice for the top. She kept it simple with her accessories by wearing diamond stud earrings.
In the movie, the Disney Channel alum plays Tashi Duncan: a tennis prodigy whose clever demeanor pits two best friends and athletes against each other. When it came to portraying an intense character like Tashi, Zendaya described how she connected to the role.
“I guess where I was trying to empathize with my character — because it’s my job, even though I think she does some s**t that I would absolutely never do — is in how nobody’s like, ‘Tashi, are you OK? What do you need?’” Zendaya told Vogue in an interview that was published on April 9. “She’s just always running s**t, and nobody is taking any of that off of her shoulders. … She’s making all the decisions. She is doing all the stuff. So, I imagine that she’s really just calling all the shots. She’s, like, everybody’s mom.”
The Spider-Man franchise actress acknowledged that Tashi “takes s**t to a while new level,” admitting that she was “kind of scared of her” upon reading the script for the first time.
“Typically, I play the person that ultimately is easier to empathize with,” Zendaya said. “There was something about her that felt very, ‘Oh, damn.’ Even I was kind of scared of her. … [But] I’d say, yeah, I’m competitive, in the sense that I want to work hard. and I try to not be competitive with anyone else. I try to just be like, I already did that, OK, so now I got to do better.”
Preparing for the athletic role required some training, and Zendaya recalled hitting the courts and the gym.
“The first little while was getting the basics, trying to just hit the f**king thing,” she said, referring to learning tennis. “One day you’d be like, ‘Oh, s**t, I cracked it. I figured it out. I got it.’ Come back in the next day, [poof].”