The “heartbreaking” scene Zendaya dreaded shooting: “It’s just painful to watch”
Zendaya, like many of the industry’s biggest stars, is a master perfectionist.
She excels at versatility and transitioning between one story to another, thriving whenever the opportunity to play a role she knows will push and challenge her comes along. From high-stakes action heroines to troubled addicts, Zendaya has more than proven herself as one of the most multifaceted players in the game.
According to the actor, this drive to embrace any sort of challenge comes from naturally being someone who likes to grab things with both hands and take full responsibility for how the final product will turn out. As she once self-described to W, she’s a Virgo, which typically includes people who are “controlling, perfectionists, self-critical, loyal, loving”.
Controlling might be a strange self-assessment, but she went on to explain that she prefers to do things herself, which was something she’d often get in trouble for as a kid in school, when she’d be teamed up with other kids but take full control and do everything herself.
“I was like, ‘You guys are going to mess it up, so don’t worry, I’ll do everything,’” she said.
In acting, this characteristic is completely priceless. After all, there’s a lot of self-confidence and ego at play whenever an actor stands in front of a camera, and while it can push some people the opposite way, and they come across as more tryhard than anything, Zendaya’s self-confidence only serves to make her characters and stories all the more believable.
Euphoria, for instance, was one of the first times that audiences got to experience a different style of acting. As far as coming-of-age stories go, Euphoria quickly gained popularity and praise for its depictions of real problems of modern youth, specifically relationships and addiction, as well as the many struggles that young people face when navigating these stresses without much help or support.
Zendaya’s character Rue is also what propelled the actor to icon status, mainly due to her immense emotional range and ability to depict something so complicated with stark authenticity. However, despite her ability to rise to any challenge, one scene in particular from the fifth episode of season two, in which Rue gets into an altercation with Leslie, was difficult for her to play.
“[Filming the scene] was scary for me,” Zendaya recalled to Thrillist. “It’s one of those episodes where it’s painful to anybody who not only cares about the character, but it’s just painful to watch, [the lines are] painful to say—it’s not something I particularly enjoyed doing to people that I deeply care about.”
To overcome the struggle, she also mentioned that she tried to distance herself from it emotionally as much as possible, so that when the time came, she wouldn’t have been so in her head about it. As she explained, “I do that: I get in my head and then I can’t just let go, and you can’t really can’t have any fears when you do a scene like that. You just have to let yourself go in that way.”
