IT’S A SPRING NIGHT in Hollywood, and I’m driving down Sunset to meet Zendaya when my phone rings. It’s Darnell, her soft-spoken assistant.
Though Zendaya is making her movie debut this summer in one of the season’s biggest blockbusters, Spider-Man: Homecoming, she is also still filming the Disney sitcom that planted her in the hearts of little tomboys everywhere—K.C. Undercover, in which she plays a teen spy who is both a math whiz and a black belt in karate.
Darnell is calling to say she is running late; a fight scene is taking longer than expected. “She’s swinging from a chain right now,” he explains politely.
When the elevator opens onto Soho House’s lobby, I walk straight into our date for the evening: Zendaya’s father, Kazembe Ajamu, a 64-year-old former P.E. teacher from Oakland. (Her mother, Claire Stoermer, is also a teacher.) Ajamu is tall and sturdy, in jeans and a navy sweatshirt, with thin shoulder-length dreadlocks pulled into a half ponytail.
We’re here because, having by now spent some time with Zendaya (pronounced “Zen-day-a”), I’m trying to wrap my mind around how a 20-year-old Disney star could be so insanely normal.
There are clues that her father, who moved with her to Los Angeles when she was thirteen, may be a key piece of the puzzle.
There is, for instance, a certain refrain running through the stories from her childhood. She lowers her voice into a spot-on imitation of Ajamu when she says it: “We’re going home.”
It’s what he would say whenever Zendaya misbehaved. The time she carried on at her grandparents’ Thanksgiving table: “We’re going home.” The time she “acted like a diva,” as she puts it, on a Sears job: “We’re going home.”
But while in person Ajamu does inspire the instant respect one reserves for, well, a supremely cool P.E. teacher—if he told me to run laps around Soho House right now, I’d abandon my glass of Malbec and strive for record time—he tells these same stories with a different emphasis.
“Man, she was two,” Ajamu says of the Thanksgiving incident, marveling at his daughter's iron will even then. “Got a block away from home before she finally gave up.”
Of the Sears episode, he recalls her obstinate pleading: “Dad, I can’t go home a failure! I can’t not do this!” He shakes his head. “She’s a tough one, man. She goin’ all the way.”
All the way indeed.
Five months after the July release of Spider-Man—it bears repeating that the juggernaut franchise is her first feature film ever—Zendaya will appear in her second, The Greatest Showman, a musical about P. T. Barnum starring Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, and Michelle Williams, scored by the Oscar-winning songwriting duo behind La La Land.
Though Zendaya is making her movie debut this summer in one of the season’s biggest blockbusters, Spider-Man: Homecoming, she is also still filming the Disney sitcom that planted her in the hearts of little tomboys everywhere—K.C. Undercover, in which she plays a teen spy who is both a math whiz and a black belt in karate.
Darnell is calling to say she is running late; a fight scene is taking longer than expected. “She’s swinging from a chain right now,” he explains politely.
When the elevator opens onto Soho House’s lobby, I walk straight into our date for the evening: Zendaya’s father, Kazembe Ajamu, a 64-year-old former P.E. teacher from Oakland. (Her mother, Claire Stoermer, is also a teacher.) Ajamu is tall and sturdy, in jeans and a navy sweatshirt, with thin shoulder-length dreadlocks pulled into a half ponytail.
We’re here because, having by now spent some time with Zendaya (pronounced “Zen-day-a”), I’m trying to wrap my mind around how a 20-year-old Disney star could be so insanely normal.
There are clues that her father, who moved with her to Los Angeles when she was thirteen, may be a key piece of the puzzle.
There is, for instance, a certain refrain running through the stories from her childhood. She lowers her voice into a spot-on imitation of Ajamu when she says it: “We’re going home.”
It’s what he would say whenever Zendaya misbehaved. The time she carried on at her grandparents’ Thanksgiving table: “We’re going home.” The time she “acted like a diva,” as she puts it, on a Sears job: “We’re going home.”
But while in person Ajamu does inspire the instant respect one reserves for, well, a supremely cool P.E. teacher—if he told me to run laps around Soho House right now, I’d abandon my glass of Malbec and strive for record time—he tells these same stories with a different emphasis.
“Man, she was two,” Ajamu says of the Thanksgiving incident, marveling at his daughter's iron will even then. “Got a block away from home before she finally gave up.”
Of the Sears episode, he recalls her obstinate pleading: “Dad, I can’t go home a failure! I can’t not do this!” He shakes his head. “She’s a tough one, man. She goin’ all the way.”
All the way indeed.
Five months after the July release of Spider-Man—it bears repeating that the juggernaut franchise is her first feature film ever—Zendaya will appear in her second, The Greatest Showman, a musical about P. T. Barnum starring Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, and Michelle Williams, scored by the Oscar-winning songwriting duo behind La La Land.
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