Sometime in the latter half of 2019, there came a tipping point where Zendaya no longer had to be explained as “former Disney-channel star Zendaya”. Euphoria was the new appointment television. All at once, Zendaya had become terrifically famous, a child star who had made it out of the House of Mouse’s fantasy high schools.

The show was held up by half its viewers as a crucial insight into the way we live now and by the other half as a moral outrage. Another high-school setting, admittedly, but one where nobody could possibly be as young as the roles they were playing, if only for legal reasons.

Up to that point, Zendaya (surname Coleman, but, as one profile writer remarked around this time, who needed that?) was known to people her own age – 22 – as Peter Parker’s book-smart girlfriend in the Spiderman films and co-star Tom Holland’s girlfriend IRL. With a parallel career as a singer, she was beloved and idealised by tween girls.

But as drug-raddled Rue – narrator of Euphoria and “a good person; she just doesn’t know it” – she would win two Emmys, one for each series, along with a Golden Globe. At 23, she was the youngest person to win the Emmy for outstanding actress in a drama, and, two years later, the youngest person to have two Emmys for anything. She would be recognised everywhere she went. A lot of people, she surmised when the series began, would have thought she couldn’t do it. “And I get it. I’m a Disney kid. There’s a lot to prove.” She proved it.

In between, she appeared as tough, desert-dwelling warrior heroine Chanti in Dune: Part One (2021), collecting a fantasy following that would encompass half the world with this year’s spectacular Dune: Part Two, currently smashing its way through one box office after another. She has 184 million Instagram followers. She is a fashion icon. She fronts a clutch of luxury brands. All demographics are covered, in other words.

What brought this home to her back in 2022 was that in Venice, where she imagined she could walk her dog unrecognised, she was snapped by a fan picking up poo. “I was like, Lord, please, don’t take a picture of me picking up my dog’s shit,” she said at the time. Luckily they missed the really mucky bit.

Now, at 27, Zendaya’s fame has taken another dramatic turn. It was time, she says. “As I get older, you know, I can’t play a teenager for the rest of my life.” In Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, she plays Tashi Duncan, an aspiring tennis star who ages through the film from 18 to 31. In her youth, Tashi is a princess of the court, adored by rival male stars played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, until her glittering future is scuppered by injury. First involved with O’Connor’s feckless Patrick, she swaps post-accident to dogged Art, sealing their lifelong, obliquely erotic friendship.

Determined to remain in some kind of game, Tashi becomes Art’s coach and manager, a kind of monster of ambition displaced onto her husband. Patrick, meanwhile, drifts to the bottom reaches of the competitive game, his drive and ability dissipated. At tournaments, he sleeps in his car. Tashi is still drawn to him, however, especially as Art’s confidence starts to crumple and he starts losing.

“I still don’t understand the decisions she makes,” Zendaya told Elle magazine. “What was important to me was that she was unapologetic about it.”

Preparing for the role, the three actors trained for six weeks with Brad Gilbert, once described by tennis great Andre Agassi as the best coach in the world. They didn’t have to hit the ball – digital imagery and their stunt doubles took care of the actual playing – but they had to look convincing swinging a racquet or running to the net.

“Even watching videos of matches helps a lot, watching all the little things they do before they start; some of the most important moments are between points or when they’re resting in the chair,” says Zendaya.

The agreed mantra for interview purposes, in fact, seems to be that it’s not really about the tennis. “You have this movie that has tennis in it,” she continues. “But it’s about all the emotions that come with the pursuit of being the best. Or the feelings of loss and grief for the career or future or life you could have had. All the decisions that lead us to who we are – that’s really what it’s about.”

And yet it is so much about tennis. As we all know, the back and forth of the game is visually compelling; here, it is elevated to grand spectacle. Guadagnino, a director who has found the ultimate beauty in food (I Am Love, 2009), summer love (Call Me By Your Name, 2017) and even grotesquery and gore in his cannibal film (Bones and All, 2022), shoots the court from above as if it were an airfield.

He then follows the ball at net-level, like action-genre master John Woo following the bullet from a gun, then turns the players into dancers who whirl through three dimensions. The game is the drama. As it must be: these are people who, as Tashi and Art’s daughter complains early in the film, only talk about tennis. Their game also tells us who they are.

“As actors, our bodies are our instruments – it is what we have – and so we have to be able to use our bodies to tell stories in whatever capacity it’s called for and needed,” says Faist, who came to acting through dance, making his name as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. “My character is the more fundamentalist, whereas Josh’s is the more wild child, you know, a kind of instinctual player.” Compare Rafael Nadal to Roger Federer, he suggests. “Depending on the people, the game is absolutely expressive of character.”

Zendaya, who had never played tennis in her life, says she found sports performance unexpectedly nerve-racking.

“I remember stepping onto the court to shoot my match at the US Open. There was a crowd, a lot of background actors who were super-hyped. You have line judges, all this stuff happening. I do my stretching, I do my serve. And I am terrified! I had feelings as if I were playing a real game. It doesn’t matter where the ball goes; there’s no pressure and I can do it again, but I was still so nervous! And I thought, ‘Oh man, imagine these same circumstances where everything is on the line: your career, your future!’ And it’s so lonely. It’s just you out there. You are your team and you have to keep your composure.”

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Of course, they all recognise this obsessive sense of purpose. It’s not so different from the ambition of actors. As O’Connor, who is probably best known as the younger Prince Charles in The Crown, says: “Being in a film – and theatre acting as well – is closer to a team sport, because it’s so much about collaboration and you’re looking out for each other. It’s not so lonely as tennis.”

Losing heart, as Art does here, however, takes the same toll. Faist has told stories of taking years to establish a career – he is now 32 – as a performer; he saw himself in Art’s on-court wobbles and growing disenchantment with competing.

“For me, Justin Kuritzkes’ script really captured what it means to be an artist: the struggle to hold on to a certain purity or joy in what we do. Trying to get back to that,” he says.

Many acting contemporaries – sometimes brilliant ones – have dropped out of the race, says O’Connor. “Talent isn’t the only thing that drives you forward. There is a sort of genetic makeup, a determination, as well.”

Zendaya, by contrast, has been working full-time since she was 13, having loitered in the wings of theatres for years before that. Her parents, now divorced, were both teachers in Oakland, California; her mother worked for the local Shakespeare Festival over the summers. “I grew up in the theatre. I was a little kid watching Richard III,” she has said.

She also started calling the shots at an early age. Working on Disney’s Shake It Up (2010-13), she refused to perform a scripted kiss because, as she said later, she didn’t want her first kiss to be on television. On her next series, K.C. Undercover (2015-18), she insisted on a title change, a producer’s credit and the inclusion of a family of colour. At 16, she knew her worth.

“If you’re in a place where you can move the needle, then do it,” she told the New York Times. The next series of Euphoria, which is entirely written and directed by Sam Levinson, has been through many revisions and is currently awaiting her comments. Her intention is to direct. Levinson predicts she will be “an astonishing filmmaker”.

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Zendaya’s CV as an adult actor is, in fact, strikingly short, interrupted and delayed as it has been by COVID-19, the actors’ strike, the time demands of two television series, and the vastness and complexity of the Dune productions, shot on remote desert locations. It is possible to see a through-line, however, between Rue, Chani and Tashi. Their intensity certainly makes a mockery of the idea that the Disney girl wouldn’t measure up when the going got tough. They are also stories, told from different angles, about women’s control over their lives.

“Rue and Tashi are both control freaks,” says Zendaya. “But Rue tries to evade that control by obvious means; the world feels too big for her, so she falls into one kind of life. Tashi ultimately finds a way to manipulate people and situations. So it’s like different mindsets, but similar fears – the fear of being left behind and then the fear that I think everyone has, of not being loved. And then that fear of not being in control.”

Euphoria’s Sam Levinson describes Zendaya as “the most competitive person I know, in a good way … always seeking a challenge, never complacent”. She also knows that her control over her fame, while formidable, is not absolute – she may keep her life with Tom Holland largely private, but there will be pap shots and, as she says, there is no fun in hiding – and that there are times when it’s better to let go.

At the end of Challengers, the first credit is Zendaya’s production company, called Why Are You Acting? The name came from a day on the Euphoria set, she says, when Levinson asked her that question. She understood immediately she was trying too hard. That he could hear the wheels grinding.

“But then part two of that was deeper,” she says. “And I could see what he was saying. ‘You’ve got this. You don’t have to pretend to know what you’re doing. Just do what you do.’ I wanted to be good so bad, but sometimes you’ve got to stop overthinking and just let yourself be. And I think we always have to ask ourselves why we’re doing what we’re doing – and learn to trust that we know.”

Challengers is in cinemas from April 18.