[MAG FAB]: Zendaya Covers British Vogue & Vogue US Simultaneously

Actress Zendaya is Vogue magazine’s May 2024 cover girl and she stuns with two beautiful covers. She becomes one of the very few stars to cover British Vogue and Vogue US simultaneously and does so effortlessly.

Below, Zendaya Talks Challengers, Talks to Serena Williams, and Considers Her Future:

“When I was younger there was less pressure,” she says. But now, while she’s in town for the couture—and can’t exit a building without trending on X—Zendaya has little choice but to become that girl again. “I got to get into a zone of being that part of myself, which is definitely not a thousand percent natural,” she allows. “She gets rusty.”

To her 184 million–odd admirers—if Instagram is anything to go by—one of Zendaya’s greatest gifts is to seem both improbably perfect (so tall, so poised, so plugged into all the right things, from racial justice to voting rights) and somehow familiar, like the girl everyone got along with in high school. “I still have to sometimes try to not fangirl when I’m around her,” says the 20-year-old actor Storm Reid, who plays her younger sister on Euphoria. The two first met over a decade ago, at a Ben & Jerry’s in Los Angeles, where Reid—then about nine—timidly asked for a picture. Within a few years they’d be singing Beyoncé songs together in Zendaya’s trailer. “She’s still one of my biggest inspirations, and I think she’s just so incredibly talented.”

Zendaya has channeled that alluring, unknowable, It-girl-next-door thing into a knack for playing good people with secrets: a teenage spy in K.C. Undercover; the charming but manipulative addict Rue in Euphoria; the acerbic introvert Michelle, a.k.a. MJ, in Spider-Man: Homecoming. (When she first auditioned for the latter part, in about 2016, “to be honest with you, neither Kevin Feige nor I knew who she was,” says Amy Pascal, who has, with Feige, produced all of Zendaya’s Spider-Man films. “She was wearing no makeup and she was just dressed like a regular girl, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, she’s amazing. She has to be in the movie.’ And then we found out she was a totally famous person, and felt really stupid.”) She’s also been a sylphlike acrobat—introduced with the words “Who’s that?”—in The Greatest Showman, and, as Chani in Dune, a shimmering desert mirage turned love interest–slash–mentor–slash–skeptic of Timothée Chalamet’s messianic Paul Atreides.

Speaking about stardom and watching her boyfriend Tom Holland’s star rise from the success of “Spiderman”, she said:Zendaya will later describe the same thing happening to Holland—who had started out in the West End, starring in Billy Elliot the Musical as a child—following the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017. “We were both very, very young, but my career was already kind of going, and his changed overnight. One day you’re a kid and you’re at the pub with your friends, and then the next day you’re Spider-Man,” she says. “I definitely watched his life kind of change in front of him. But he handled it really beautifully.” (This May, Holland returns to his theater roots in a new London production of Romeo & Juliet. Zendaya says she “could not be more proud. I’m going to try to see as many shows as I possibly can.”)

On the subject of Holland, she also recalls a trip to Paris in fall 2022, when the couple planned to visit the Louvre. Well, the powers that be didn’t really want them there: The feedback was, “It’s already busy. You might make it worse.” But they decided to go anyway—information that became impossible to escape that week on social media, as shots of the pair holding hands while they listened to a guide, or posing in front of the Mona Lisa, circulated far and wide. “It was actually fine,” Zendaya says now. “You just kind of get used to the fact that, Oh, I’m also one of these art pieces you’re going to take a picture of. I just gotta be totally cool with it and just live my life.” And, anyway, the fame thing sort of redeemed itself in the end: The museum let them linger after closing time. “It was one of the coolest experiences ever,” she says, her eyes flashing like a child’s. “It was like Night at the Museum.”

More of this interview HERE

BY MARLEY MARIUS

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANNIE LEIBOVITZ

STYLED BY LAW ROACH