I love Zendaya, I love her. She is just fun to watch. She has a great laugh. She can be extremely dramatic when necessary. “I’m not doing well.” There’s something about her eyes when they go dark. There’s something about her eyes when they go bright. There’s a soul in this person and I think that her potential is off the charts. “Euphoria” is back right now. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” “Me? In Mexico?” I am excited that that show has returned for its last season, because she’s given one of the best performances I’ve ever seen on TV. “We all answer to God.” But the movies have not responded to how good she is on that show with material that is worthy of her. She’s got a bunch of films coming out in 2026. There’s another “Dune” movie, another “Spider-Man” movie. She’s going to be in Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.” And right now, “The Drama,” an almost good use of Zendaya. The premise here is that two people are getting married, and one night — “I’ll tell mine if we all do it. Promise?” People start talking about the worst thing they did. And she says what hers is. “OK, I, um — —” Everybody freaks out about what it is. “I’m, I’m, I’m sorry. I um — —” “Should we order an Uber?” “Emma, What the [expletive]?” The movie goes from being this, you know, kind of interesting movie about two people getting ready to spend the rest of their lives with each other, to Robert Pattinson’s character — he’s her fiancé — freaking out about what she’s divulged. “So you are thinking about it.” “[Expletive], I am thinking about it now.” Not a great use of Zendaya. I think part of the thing that, like, limits what she can do in “The Drama” is that it is fundamentally afraid of the thing it’s really about. Which is a Black woman marrying a white man. You know, this freakout to me feels very racialized. He’s marrying a Black woman who has expressed some violent thoughts and he can’t handle them. “It’s just some drama.” And in his freaking out this leaves her on the sidelines trying to convince him that what she did was in the past. She didn’t really do it, and he should calm down a little bit. This movie could have been an opportunity to really talk about what psychologically is going on for these characters. And why is this Robert Pattinson character freaking out about it 15 years later? She seems fine now. Or is she fine? So there’s a way in which the film is kind of playing games with us, but there’s a way in which the film also doesn’t know what it’s dealing with in having cast, to start with, this Black woman as the star of its movie.
About The Author
