Her father is her bodyguard, and her dazzling success: the Zendaya mystery

Zendaya is only 26 years old, but she has already fulfilled several lives.

For a whole generation, call them millennials or centennials, girls and boys born between 1995 and 2011, children of social networks and the pandemic, who have known the world only a computerized version, regulated by the image that the 'we give of ourselves and are constantly subject to the judgment of others, a generation for which everything is based on performance, Zendaya is something more than an actress.

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She is an ideal: an icon.

She is also the enigma in the mirror: the one in whom they instantly recognize themselves, but about whom they know very little.

What Zendaya experiences and which allows her to play out the troubles and struggles of an entire generation caught up in its complexity, we do not know.

It does not spread in declarations on the networks.

His interviews are sporadic and hardly suggest anything.

In any case, nothing intimate.

What animates her inner life, what deeply motivates her career choices, as an actress, as a star (she will be the heroine of

opposite Timothée Chalamet, expected this year) or as a producer, choice among the most intelligent and surprising in the world of cinema, we have not the slightest suspicion.

In video, alongside Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya hypnotizes the Venice Film Festival

Maternal heritage

A few weeks ago, she gave a long interview for Lancôme, of which she is now the ambassador.

She praises the sometimes "experimental" character of the Idôle perfume advertising campaign in which she appears (both as an Amazon or as a Statue of Liberty, a bottle in her hands).

She does not forget the intimate heritage of a mother and a grandmother who were elegant and whom she “would like to resemble in everything”.

What motivates her can be summed up in a few words: “Proposing something new, new ideas.”

She herself does not hide from suggesting lines of thought to the brand.

Playing the only fashion plates is clearly not his cup of tea.

She is today, and it is rare, co-producer of most of the series and films in which she appears.

Its investment in the projects is of the order of the total.

No, honestly, secrets, I don't have any

Zendaya

The rest of the interview is opaque: she delivers crumbs of clues: yes, she has been a vegetarian “since the age of 11” – “a decision made after learning where the meat came from”.

She lets it be understood that “joy” alone occupies her.

Joy ?

Yes, at least that's the name she gives to the feeling of power against all odds that the track

by Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion, when she discovered it when it was released in April 2020, in the midst of Covid petrification and while the whole world was living in quarantine.

Maybe it all goes back further.

Perhaps to childhood, to an upbringing where his parents taught him "to be confident and have a strong sense of independence."

"It's not nothing, she adds, when you start a career so young, as a child, because then no one in your school looks like you, you have no one to compare yourself to: you discover that you you are not like the others: you are just yourself.”

His mantra?

“Be a good person.”

Secrets ?

"No, frankly, secrets, I don't have any."

The unconscious of a whole generation

Zendaya doesn't want to just be a star, she's aiming for something else the century has yet to name.

A consciousness ?

The word brings with it political commitments – one immediately thinks of a humanitarian use of celebrity, and that is not what it is about.

Even if she has made the representation of African-American women her cause, and she works there better than anyone, and is committed to associations...

No, it would rather be an unconscious: to be like the unconscious of an entire generation.

Which admires him, but as a perpetually stolen object, à la Garbo.

Zendaya plays and jealously guards her boundary with the intimate.

It's almost a miracle when you're 25 and have a career that questions the notions of virality, and you carry on your shoulders an already cult series, in just two seasons,

, which says exactly everything that a 17-18 year old teenager goes through in today's world: his inability to preserve a part of himself that is not given over to others.

In video,

Euphoria

: the trailer

What Zendaya Coleman does in

is unprecedented.

She is this body, this face, against which psychology, good resolutions have no hold.

She is not, however, a victim.

She is a sort of everyday warrior, an everyday teenager in a world surrounded by far too adult temptations.

Contact with pornography is permanent there.

Drugs are so present that if Rue – her character – manages one day, around 19, to get out of it, she can say she has come a long way.

The teenage world of

is scary because it's big and expansive like a cellphone screen.

And human relations are redeemable there.

All except love which, in

is Shakespearean, sublime.

It is about beings that Rue idealizes as angels.

Half-boy, half-girl creatures metamorphosing like a butterfly in a song by Rosalía (which is the hyperpop equivalent of Zendaya):

 (I'm totally me, I transform. A butterfly, I transform. Drag queen makeup, I

. for her: it is enough to look back at the first lives of Zendaya, who has already had at least three, to feel dizzy.

Disney product

The Oakland child born in September 1996, of Zimbabwean origin, daughter of a theater teacher and a sports teacher who has since become his bodyguard and manager, therefore started as a child.

By dancing.

By acting.

Then it became this weird thing that only exists in the United States: a Disney product.

A child star who provides every day, in series, in hits of a season, unequivocal good feelings.

A smooth and ideal product.

A perfect build.

Seeing them again today, in the light of

is somewhat ironic.

In

(series launched in 2010, when Zendaya was only 14 years old), they were two kids born to dance: there was Raquel Blue and CeCe Jones.

Raquel was the good student, and CeCe the rebel.

Zendaya played Raquel, Bella Thorne CeCe.

In three seasons, they had become the new Selena Gomez and, in the last episode of season 3, Raquel sang a piece of farewell with the strange title:

.

Do not forget me.

As if, at 16, she was already wondering how to survive on her own.

She turns into a secret agent in 2015 in a nice series,

, from the pure Disney Channel, where she is once a sort of contest beast, her parents' favorite child and a secret agent for the US government.

It's Fantômette and James Bond at the same time – as if being the household genius wasn't enough.

She does karate and wonders every day how to protect the world.

When she got out of this bubble, here she was in a secondary role in the

where she met her future

, Tom Holland.

Lancôme beauty treatment with: Advanced Génifique, Teint Idôle Ultra Wear 055 Bisque, Teint Idôle Ultra All Over Concealer 051, Blush Subtil 02, Brow Define Pencil 06 Brown Hypnôse Palette French Nude, Lash Idôle Liner, Cils Booster, Lash Idôle Mascara 01, and the Absolu Rouge Cream 253.

Alexandre Vauthier suit, Aisling Camps top, Jennifer Fisher hoop earrings.

Micaiah Carter for Lancome

But it's his mind-blowing appearance one day in June 2019 in the first episode of

which atomizes in a few seconds a career of already ten years to play the model child.

This time, Zendaya will not be a smiling puppet.

She lost her Disney license a long time ago, this certificate of innocence in the tart world of young and already commercial culture.

Rue will not be an American Martine.

What we know of Rue, we learned too quickly, colliding with the first minutes of the series: under a blue light, liquid and asphyxiating, similar to that of a club in which one would enter under anesthesia, Rue tells her only friend (incidentally her dealer) about the overdose that struck her down during the summer: “After each inspiration, we expel all of our oxygen.

Everything freezes.

The heart, the lungs, and finally the brain.

The sensations, the desires, everything

we want to forget… Everything is swallowed up…” Rue, 17, recovered from this engulfment, contemplates the world of adolescence: it looks like a big pitiless video game in which Rue plays his part, solo, his face closed, impassive, or else, on the contrary, seized with pangs, nervous tics.

Either she is too controlling or she is overwhelmed.

Zendaya has the art of telling Rue through her disintegration.

The hard skin of teenagers

Where does this fear of danger come from that crosses us when we watch it in

 ?

Probably because

shows a raw girl in a world where secrecy no longer exists.

In Sam Levinson's series, the 2022 notion of intimacy has nothing to do with the one we knew.

describes an intimacy similar to that of the content sharing platform OnlyFans: an area that is in principle closed, but access to which (paid, symbolically) is synonymous in return with a total exposure, advertising.

Life in

only makes sense if you've come close to overdosing and you feel the courage to come back from it.

Overdose and survival: that's all there is to it.

At the antipodes of the enchanted world of Disney, Zendaya puts on the armor of a generation summoned to go far in order to be able to begin the slow work of assuming.

His wanderings, his impulses, his desires, his weight, his physique, his color, his gender which has never necessarily been the one registered on the papers issued at birth.

Exaggerate his chances of having a "destiny".

Exploring self-hatred.

Defy the shame, the pain, assume the devastation.

To live up to your own disasters.

To live up to the false image that one has given of oneself on the networks.

Living up to the widespread surveillance that Instagram brings.

But above all, live up to your own assertion.

To live up to what is called one's identity.

who doesn't care about actions, has only one subject: the skin of adolescents, their tough skin.

Read also "We have so many demands on them": why suicide attempts are exploding among teenage girls?

Zendaya took all the risks to dare to embody Rue.

It could have closed all the doors to him.

“Burn it up” as they say in the trade.

It was the reverse.

Because Zendaya understood before anyone else that teenagers in the 2020s no longer want to be lied to by selling them a candid and cute world.

They constantly take refuge in childhood, in totems, fetishes, but then to better face the outside, this reality that they know is implacable.

They didn't need another

, but a stubborn girl who would embody a minority voice that never breaks.

Zendaya makes us feel old.

We watch it as we approach the core of a melting nuclear reactor.

Dazed, asking the only question that is worth: "What