By Jessica Zack

When COVID19 was declared a pandemic in March and forced everyone to collectively hit pause on their lives and reconsider how we work, travel and socialize, Zendaya admits she was knocked flat by the sudden downshift. She’s not one to coast or slow down by choice.

The 24yearold actress, singer and fashion icon had been going fulltilt, from one increasingly highprofile project to the next, for more than a decade, ever since being cast on her first Disney Channel series while still attending middle school in her hometown of Oakland.

Zendaya’s teen years catapulted her from a Disney regular to a mainstream movie star (in two Marvel “SpiderMan” movies and the musical “The Greatest Showman”) before she got to show off a darker, more complex side in “Euphoria.”

On the sexsaturated Gen Z HBO drama series, she plays the sensitive drug addict Rue, who’s struggling to stay clean — a role for which Zendaya won an Emmy in September.

So when she got word, just a day before she was to begin shooting the second season of “Euphoria,” that the production was shut down indefinitely, Zendaya didn’t want to hang out at home and bake sourdough. She wanted to act.

“I absolutely wanted to get back to work. I mean, I’ve been working consistently since I was like 13 years old,” Zendaya told The Chronicle recently over a video call from Atlanta, where she was on location shooting “SpiderMan 3,” eager to discuss her new film

“Malcolm & Marie,” which she has kept under wraps since filming the clandestine project in Carmel over the summer.

“I don’t know what it is not to work, so when quarantine hit and that was gone, I had to think about, ‘Who am I without this?’ ” she said. “‘What do I even like?

Dominic Miller / Netflix “Malcolm & Marie” costars John David Washington (left) and Zendaya go over lines with writerdirector Sam Levinson, above. Washington and Zendaya play a couple, right, who argue over the course of an evening.