‘Get me Zendaya’: How the actress became the hottest property in Hollywood
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Eleanor Halls is a writer covering music, books, movie and TV, as well as co-host of chart-topping pop culture podcast Straight Up. Eleanor was previously The Telegraph's associate culture editor and senior staff writer at British GQ. She has interviewed everyone from Liam Neeson, Colin Firth and Naomi Campbell to Stormzy, Mel C and Alison Hammond.
Adding to this, Consider The Odyssey ’s month-long promotional campaign and you might assume Zendaya had a leading role in the movie. Not only did she do countless major interviews, but she dominated social media after each premiere thanks to her signature “ method dressing ”. Vogue described her press tour fashion as just “as epic as The Odyssey ” itself, with one particular look – a white Matières Fécales gown with large feathered wings – having been reserved by her stylist and “image architect” Law Roach for two whole years.
Meanwhile, A white Matières Fécales gown with wings was reserved for the star for more than two years Credit : Christopher Polk/Deadline via Getty This month, the number of Google searches for her name eclipsed those for the movie’s leading man, Matt Damon, and it was easy to forget that her own husband, Marvel star Tom Holland, has the second-highest billing after Damon as Odysseus’s son , Telemachus. As Robert Pattinson, who also appears in the movie, quipped: “Whenever Zendaya’s coming to something, you’re like, ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to get outshone.’”
Notably, Yet when it comes to actual screen time, Zendaya, who plays the goddess Athena, only clocked five minutes out of the three-hour runtime – and barely says a word. It didn’t stop her earning a reported $5m (£3.7m – though some reports have it even higher). Considering that Christopher Nolan ’s adaptation of a nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem has managed to become the biggest cultural moment of 2026 thus far, this seems to have paid off.
As per the latest buzz, Today, Zendaya has become Hollywood’s centre of gravity. At a time when the industry needs all the help it can get to cajole young audiences away from YouTube and out to the cinema, the 29-year-old former Disney star’s talent, cultural power, pristine image, savvy marketing nous and generation-spanning fanbase (with more than 178 million Instagram followers) has made her one of its most bankable stars. Not to mention the fact that she looks like a supermodel, while managing to emit a warmth and relatability – she eschewed Los Angeles to live in south-west London with Holland (the world’s highest-grossing young star, no less) – that makes followers believe she could be their new best friend.
In further updates, Zendaya married Tom Holland, her British co-star of The Odyssey and the Spider-Man films, earlier this year Credit : Andreas Solaro/AFP/Getty Over the past few year, she and Holland have become one of Hollywood’s most beloved couples by maintaining a privacy and normalcy to their relationship – they as per reports married quietly somewhere a few months ago – that contrasts with the showbiz maximalism of Taylor Swift’s recent marriage to Travis Kelce , which was hosted at Madison Square Garden with a 1,000-person guest list. Zendaya and Holland are often spotted in innocuous places around the UK (from Waitrose to Gail’s and their local cinema to a curry house in Market Harborough, Leicestershire), while 5ft 8in Holland regularly goes widely shared for gazing adoringly at his 5ft10in wife as she glides across a red carpet.
On top of that, So far in 2026, she has helped indie movie studio A24 achieve its third-highest-grossing movie as the lead of marriage thriller The Drama , and drawn record-breaking ratings for the third season of HBO’s juggernaut TV drama Euphoria , for which her $1m-an-episode pay cheque made her the highest-paid black woman in television history.
Alongside Robert Pattinson in A24’s The Drama… Credit : A24 …And as the lead in the third season of HBO’s juggernaut TV drama Euphoria Credit : HBO She is now co-headlining the press tour for Spider-Man: Brand New Day alongside Holland, while this winter will see her star opposite Timothée Chalamet in Dune: Part Three , earning her $8m. Although she started the sci-fi franchise with just seven minutes of screen time in 2021, her role as Chani was heavily expanded by director Denis Villeneuve for Dune: Part Two , which achieved the biggest domestic opening since the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon of July 2023. She has an estimated net worth of $40m.
Source: The Telegraph