Zendaya’s favourite Christopher Nolan movie: “Might be the best I’ve ever seen”
After the announcement that Zendaya will star in Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film The Odyssey, it might just be that this is the biggest project to cross off her acting bucket list. Ever since the beginning of her career as a Disney child star on shows like Shake It Up and K.C. Undercover, the actor soared to new heights after her portrayal of Rue, a recovering addict in Sam Levinson’s hit young adult drama Euphoria.
The show demands a lot of her dramatic talents, marking her as a once-in-a-generational talent as she hurls abuse at her on-screen mother and screams while bashing down doors, doing everything in her power to both stay away from drugs while being pulled towards it.
Since then, the actor has announced collaborations with directors like Luca Guadagnino, Kristoffer Borgli and Denis Villeneuve, showcasing great emotional depths and nuance in her portrayals of complex characters like Tashi Duncan and Chani. But while working with any of these directors is a huge accomplishment in its own right, it seems as though Zendaya’s role in The Odyssey might just be her crowning glory, especially given her personal love for Christopher Nolan and one film of his in particular.
Nolan’s presence in the film industry cannot be understated, with a colossal command over cinema as he draws in huge audiences for each spectacle he creates. Whether it be the Oscar-winning legacy of Oppenheimer, the influential power of The Dark Knight Rises, forever changing the genre of comic. Book movies or Inception, which altered our perception of how cinema can be bent to fit a myriad of worlds, both real and imagined.
But for Zendaya, there was one film that spoke to her most of all, citing the moving power of Interstellar, which is one of the most beloved in his filmography for its emotional narrative and central relationship between father and daughter, culminating in a devastating scene as Matthew McConaughey’s character realises that he has missed the experience of watching his children grow up will stuck in space.
His concepts are extremely complex and existentialist, often creating plot lines that hinge around surrealist ideas and expand on the rules of the real world. Perhaps this is why Zendaya found it so captivating, with the actor saying, “Interstellar might be the best movie I’ve ever seen… I need to go somewhere and contemplate life”.
This is a fairly typical reaction to come away with after watching Interstellar, with many feeling puzzled and slightly in a daze after contemplating the many layers that keep revealing themselves to audiences as the story unravels. Leonardo DiCaprio does an excellent job of playing on this uncertainty and absurdism, capturing the unstable territory of living in a dream world and how everything keeps crumbling before your eyes. It might be his most crucial film, and one that symbolises the key aspects of his work that have allowed him to build such a huge cult following. There is no doubt that elements of this style will be present in The Odyssey, leading Zendaya to embark on an entirely new venture.
