Zendaya is a force of nature who brings her all to every project she works on. Whether you saw her doing acrobatics in The Greatest Showman, or battling the sand in Dune, Zendaya knows how to keep movie-goers attention with her acting skills.
On April 26, Zendaya’s new film Challengers hit theaters. The film follows her character Tashi, a former tennis prodigy turned coach, who’s married to Art (Mike Faist), a champion on a losing streak. Tashi’s strategy for her husband’s redemption takes a surprising turn when he must face off against his ex-best friend and Tashi’s former boyfriend, Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor).
We know that Zendaya serves looks with every outfit she wears on the red carpet, but does she actually know how to serve a tennis ball in Challengers?
It seems like there’s nothing Zendaya can’t do because she actually learned how to play tennis for Challengers. While filming the movie, she worked alongside professional tennis player, Brad Gilbert, a consultant on the film.
“We would train early in Boston. We would do a couple of hours every day and then a couple of hours in the gym, they had long days — a lot of time in Boston we were in the car by 6 a.m,” Gilbert said when talking about training for the film with Tennis365.
When speaking to the Daily Mail in April 2024, Zendaya shared what it was like training for Challengers. “We just trained beside each other, we did our tennis practice beside each other, we did rehearsals and we had incredible tennis doubles as well that we learned from and worked beside and who also made us look good,” she said.
While we all know how phenomenally talented Zendaya is, director Guadagnino confirmed it when speaking to Variety in October 2022. “I mean, wow. We edited the movie, and we almost didn’t actually use any of her double. She’s so good.”
While appearing on The Kelly Clarkson Show on April 25, Zendaya admitted that despite going to tennis school, she didn’t “get good” at the sport. “I wish I could say that I was better at tennis,” she admitted.
Clarkson then shared a video of Zendaya practicing alongside her tennis double, Kara Hall. “As you can see, she’s working with a ball, and I am next to her without a ball,” she said.
Zendaya shared that she wasn’t a fan of the tennis ball flying at her. However, she tapped into her dancing roots and tried her best to approach the moves like choreography.
“We did tennis training for several weeks and I was really beating myself up because one day you feel like, ‘OK I got this’ and the next day you come in and you don’t got it,” Zendaya said. “So I was like, ‘I wonder if I took the ball out of the equation.’ I just tried to say, ‘How can I get into this physically in a way that makes sense for me?’ Well, I am a dancer, I do have some of that left in me, so let me try to approach this from a dancer’s perspective.”
Whether you enjoy tennis or just want to see another show-stopping performance from Zendaya, you won’t want to miss out on watching Challengers this April. Who knows? If she ever wants to take a break from acting, she could potentially delve into a tennis career.