



1 / 8 Chevron Chevron Photographed by Tyler Mitchell, Vogue, June 2019 Posed for Greatness The 22-year-old actor, photographed in Los Angeles, in a Marni dress and chain belt.

Fashion Editor: Camilla Nickerson.

For months, it’s been raining in L.A. But the first day of spring dawns bright and clear. As I make my way to Zendaya’s house in the San Fernando Valley, wildflowers, nourished by the downpour, sprout along the roadside in fistfuls of orange and purple, and everyone—everyone—seems to be leaning out of their car windows to snap shots. It’s a moment for stopping and smelling the roses, so to speak, and I’m expecting to find Zendaya doing some version of that. It’s her first day off after a season of breakneck work, toggling between the splashy debut of her TommyxZendaya collection in Paris, photo shoots for Lancôme—the 22-year-old recently became the brand’s youngest global ambassador—and filming HBO’s gritty new series Euphoria, in which “Z,” as everyone involved with the show calls her, plays the lead role of Rue, a recovering and relapsing young drug addict. Surely Zendaya Maree Stoermer Coleman will be lazing about, maybe soaking up rays by the side of her pool.

Instead, she jokes when I arrive, she’s taken yet another job. “I’m an Uber driver now,” she says as she unlocks the massive black SUV parked outside her garage. Her car is in the shop, she explains with a shake of her shower-wet hair, so she’s rented this gargantuan thing for the purpose of picking up her half-sister Kizzi’s two daughters from school. She’s in a hurry but doesn’t seem like it; she tucks her oversize button-down into her jeans in a leisurely, offhand way, and pours her miniature schnauzer, Noon, into a bed in the backseat. He curls up without complaint, and just like that, we’re back on the road, headed to a nearby middle school. Zendaya likes to drive fast. “This’ll make her nuts,” she says, anticipating the pickup of twelve-year-old Imani. “I’m going to honk the horn really loud, a bunch of times, and watch—she’ll be so embarrassed.”

Tweens mill about outside the school, blissfully unaware of the presence of a superstar many of them likely follow on Instagram. Honk. Imani, eyes glued to her phone, looks up. Honk-honk-honk. Zendaya laughs as her niece shoots us a stormy glare. “Imani likes to pretend she doesn’t love me,” she says. “But she does.” “I hate you,” Imani says, not meaning it, as she slides into the seat beside Noon. And we’re off, racing to Burbank to collect Niece #2.

Zendaya asks Imani about her day. Silence from the backseat. “Now, that I remember from school,” she says. “That thing of getting home and saying, Oh, nothing happened, I didn’t learn anything, my life is so boring, leave me alone.” Zendaya left her traditional school when she was about Imani’s age, moving from her childhood home of Oakland to Hollywood and a mini-classroom on the set of the Disney series Shake It Up, where she worked with a tutor handpicked by her parents (Kazembe Ajamu and Claire Stoermer, both former teachers). “The funny thing is, here I am, working on a show where I play a high school student, and it’s like—at that age, everything is happening, all the time. It’s all coming at you.”