By Zendaya’s many accounts, she was preternaturally talented and ambitious, deciding at 12 or 13 that she wanted to be in TV and movies “so bad” that she convinced her school teacher parents to let her move from Oakland to Los Angeles so she could launch a career as an entertainer.
But now, at 27, the Emmy-winning star of “Euphoria” and “Dune: Part 2,” and this year’s Met Gala co-host, is reflecting on the consequences of becoming a star at such a young age, starting with her success at 14 on the Disney Channel sitcom “Shake It Up.”
“I don’t know how much of a choice I had,” Zendaya said in a new interview with Vogue and British Vogue. “I have complicated feelings about kids and fame and being in the public eye, or being a child actor.”
HOLLYWOOD, CA – FEBRUARY 11: (L-R) Claire Stoermer, actress/singer Zendaya and Kazembe Ajamu Coleman attend the 2016 Essence Black Women in Music event at Avalon on February 11, 2016 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Earl Gibson III/Getty Images for ESSENCE)
“We’ve seen a lot of cases of it being detrimental,” she continued. “I think only now, as an adult, am I starting to go, Oh, okay, wait a minute: I’ve only ever done what I’ve known, and this is all I’ve known.”
Zendaya also acknowledged that she became the “breadwinner” in her Oakland family, and suggested that it created an unusual dynamic for her and her parents.
“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,” Zendaya told Vogue.
There’s never been any suggestion that Zendaya’s mother and father, Claire Stoermer and dad Kazembe Ajamu Coleman, were pushy stage parents. If anything, profiles of Zendaya make it seem as though they were devoted parents who supported their daughter. She is their only child together, while her father had five older children from a previous marriage.
If Zendaya said she was the family “breadwinner,” it makes sense, given that Stoermer and Coleman were public school teachers in Oakland, which means they could have struggled to maintain a modest standard of living in the expensive Bay Area.
During summers, when Zendaya was a child, Stoermer, a long-time teacher at Fruitvale Elementary School in Oakland, also picked up extra work as the house manager of the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda. But the side benefit of this gig is that it gave Stoermer’s future movie-star daughter an early exposure to professional acting; Zendaya has talked about watching performances from the back of the house.
When Zendaya first sought to launch her career, she told Complex in 2015 that her father would drive them both back and forth to Los Angeles. Eventually, he moved with her to Los Angeles so she could work for the Disney Channel. He also left teaching to become her manager, according to People.
By 2015, Zendaya was “a mega-famous Disney actor and pop star on the rise,” Complex reported, though she and her parents occupied a “modest” home in L.A.’s Echo Park neighborhood. The Complex story also credited Stoermer and Coleman with keeping the teen star “grounded.”
Zendaya herself praised her parents in a 2016 interview with Ellen DeGeneres: “I gotta give it up to my parents. I’m really lucky to have the parents that I have. They just have always instilled in me those core values that I think I have to carry with me through everything.”
Oakland native Zendaya (center) plays a tennis coach caught between two competing players in “Challengers.” Also starring are Mike Faist, left, and Josh O’Connor. (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
But nearly a decade later, Zendaya has admitted to “complicated” feelings about her upbringing, telling Vogue that she missed out on normal teen experiences. While she spent some time at the Oakland School for the Arts, which serves grades 6 to 12, she said she didn’t go to high school, even though she successfully played high school students in her breakout film role in 2017’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and in HBO’s teen drama “Euphoria.”
“I’m almost going through my angsty teenager phase now,” she told Vogue, “because I didn’t really have the time to do it before.”
The Vogue profile is coming at a crucial time in Zendaya’s career. She talked about finally moving into adult roles, with Vogue noting that she co-starred in the little-seen “Malcolm and Marie” in 2021. She made the spare, low-budget Netflix marital drama during lockdown with “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson and John David Washington.
But her new film, “Challenger,” marks her first full-fledged leading-lady role, in which she plays a married woman and a mother, Vogue said. The film debuts April 26. Zendaya admitted to Vogue that she felt anxiety about moving into this new stage in her career.
“Now, when I have these moments in my career — like, my first time leading a film that’s actually going to be in a theater — I feel like I shrink, and I can’t enjoy all the things that are happening to me, because I’m like this,” Zendaya said, balling up her fists, according to Vogue.
“I’m very tense, and I think that I carry that from being a kid and never really having an opportunity to just try (expletive),” she said. “And I wish I went to school.”
