“I got in a room with the heads of Disney Channel,” Zendaya says, recounting a meeting that took place four years ago, when she was sixteen. By this time she had already completed her first Disney show, Shake It Up, in which she costarred as an aspiring dancer alongside Bella Thorne. For her to sign on to K.C. Undercover, she decided, Disney would need to meet demands. First they would need to make her a producer. Next she objected to the show’s title, which at the time was Super Awesome Katy. “I was like, ‘The title is whack. That’s gonna change.’ ” She then rejected her character’s name (“Do I look like a Katy to you?”) and insisted that the show feature a family of color.

There were other conditions: “I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t good at singing or acting or dancing. That she wasn’t artistically inclined. I didn’t want them to all of a sudden be like, ‘Oh, yeah, and then she sings this episode!’ No. She can’t dance; she can’t sing. She can’t do that stuff. There are other things that a girl can be.” Zendaya issued some final requirements: “I want her to be martial arts–trained. I want her to be able to do everything that a guy can do. I want her to be just as smart as everybody else. I want her to be a brainiac. I want her to be able to think on her feet. But I also want her to be socially awkward, not a cool kid. I want her to be normal with an extraordinary life.”

In using her leverage to seize control in this manner, Ajamu says, “she broke all the rules.” To Zendaya, it was a no-brainer. “A lot of people don’t realize their power,” she says. “I have so many friends who say yes to everything or feel like they can’t stand up for themselves in a situation.” She is now pounding a fist on the dining table at Soho House. “No: You have the power.”

THIS SELF-ASSUREDNESS—this innate, unwavering belief in her own value and that of others—is exactly what Zendaya pro­jects to her young fans, both through the Disney character she helped create and in real life. Right as the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and so many more were sending the message that black lives did not matter, Zendaya was bringing a strong character of color into the world of children’s television, and in doing so became a kind of beacon—one who continues to say, over and over, “I know your worth.” It’s why she’s trailed by more than 41 million followers on Instagram. And it’s why, her Spider-Man costar Laura Harrier says, recalling the weeks they spent shooting in Georgia last summer, “we’d be getting our nails done in Atlanta, and people would come up to her, crying.”