That time I asked Zendaya about pizza.
Cringe.
Once upon a time I asked Zendaya for her favourite pizza topping.
It’s one of those moments that will forever live rent free in my subconscious, attaching itself to any passing reference of Zendaya to haunt me.
Remember when you did that? Mate? Remember?
I asked her this in the context of an interview for Girlfriend magazine, as part of a Spiderman press junket. She was playing the female lead and love interest to her now-boyfriend Tom Holland.
Ever gracious as she is, you might’ve expected her to respond with good humour.
“Ooh, a classic margarita…”, she might’ve offered with a shrug and a smile.
But she didn’t do that. She was sitting next to her personal assistant, Darnell Appling, in a trailer in LA worlds away from my tiny cubicle on floor 18 of a publishing company in Sydney. And she laughed at me.
Not with me. At.
“Pizza topping? Uhhhhh….. I don’t know. That doesn’t really… I don’t know,” she managed.
As if to say, ‘of all the questions you could ask me - Zendaya?’
Then she did something worse than the laugh.
She smirked. At Appling. They smirked at each other.
All completely justified of course, the question was stupid. These conversations often were. A magazine version of the gamification of celebrity content that now populates so many YouTube channels.
Rob Lowe tries out hot sauce!
Rita Ora sings tweets about herself!
But I was just doing my job. I wasn’t writing a lofty profile for Vanity Fair or iD, this was Girlfriend, and we needed teen-friendly content.
Anyway. At the time we wanted to put her on our cover but were told quite unceremoniously that she ‘wouldn’t sell magazines’. The subtext of that, well I’ll let you figure out for yourself.
Which is ironic because I was also editing Total Girl, a magazine for tween girls, and Zendaya was our cover star every second month. That audience - that enthusiastic, unbiased, Disney-loving army of little girls, adored her authentically. Couldn’t get enough.
What’s that saying? ‘First the girls, then the gays, then everyone’?
Now everyone’s caught up.
Euphoria, a handful of Emmy’s, a juggernaut sci-fi film franchise and a sexy new tennis movie garnering Oscar buzz. Two jaw-dropping press circuits in the space of a month and - in partnership with her stylist, Law Roach - she’s fast-becoming one of the most fashionable women of her time. Perhaps of all time.
She also recently landed the holy grail of magazine covers, fronting British and American Vogue at the same time; something previously reserved for the Adele’s and maybe Beyoncé’s.
Now we can add Zendaya to that untouchable upper-echelon of celebrity. All this and she’s *checks notes* … 27.
An icon is rising.
And I once asked her about pizza.
(I think she’d be a pepperoni girl.)