The evolution of Zendaya
Youngest Emmy winner got her start as a shy child in Bay Area theater groups
Before Oakland native Zendaya became the youngest actor to win an Emmy Award, for her work on HBO’s “Euphoria,” she was a Bay Area theater kid.
When you watch her on “Euphoria,” where she plays a teenage drug addict, you might think you see a prophet or a time traveler. Her eyes seem to see far, far beyond what others on the show can see — an ability that can either ground or destabilize.
According to her drama instructors and coaches at the California Shakespeare Theater and her directors at Berkeley Playhouse and TheatreWorks, that quality was always inside her, but it didn’t fully manifest at first.
Zendaya was once so quiet she had to repeat kindergarten, says her mother, Claire Stoermer. “She just sat there, and the teacher just kind of let her sit there.”
Theater classes at Cal Shakes, starting when Zendaya was in third grade, helped change that. “I had to push her to go to it,” Stoermer says. “But I do remember seeing her up there on that stage, and just the few little moments that she had her spotlight, it was like, ‘ whoa.’ ”
Stoermer wasn’t much of a theater person until by chance she got a summer job as Cal Shakes’ house manager to supplement her and her thenhusband’s income as teachers. She wound up working there for 12 summers.
When Zendaya was 7 or 8, she started accompanying her mother to performances, handing out programs and selling raffle tickets to the audience before shows. She started gravitating backstage, where she could hang out with the actors if she was quiet, then eventually into the theater, where she’d watch the performance every night.
“She had this routine,” Stoermer says. “She would go to catering. They would give her a burrito and a Snapple. She would go up into the back of the house, grab a chair and a bunch of blankets and just sit up in the back and watch the show.”
By third grade, Zendaya was taking classes in the Cal Shakes conservatory. “Cal Shakes had — has — an incredible education program,” Stoermer says. “They really focus on the process, not the product. ... ( Teachers) would break everything down. They would have ( students) relate it to themselves, like, ‘ What would you do if you were in this situation?’ ”
For Zendaya, theater classes at Cal Shakes “brought her out of her shell,” Stoermer says.
Trish Tillman, a former teaching artist at Cal Shakes and now a consultant on the company’s teaching guides, remembers working with Zendaya on scenes from “Macbeth,” “As You Like It” and “Richard III” when the future star was in grade school.
“I’d love to say she was an extraordinary, completely gifted child, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about her,” Tillman says of those earliest days. “She was just getting used to what the idea of drama was, being onstage with other kids.”
By sixth grade, Tillman started to see “some kind of spirit” and decided to cast Zendaya as Lady Anne in the scene in “Richard III” when the noblewoman goes from loathing the title character to agreeing to be his wife.
“In retrospect, I think I miscast her,” Tillman says. “She did fine, but she was not a gentle soul, meaning that she wasn’t aggressive or anything, but she has that real tomboyish energy — capable, straightforward, tells it to you like how it is. She’s not dissembling, and Lady Anne tries to dissemble. ... She was pretty good at the aggression part, but she was not good at the, ‘ Oh, I’ll just soften up and do it.’ ” Tillman now thinks she ought to have cast Zendaya as a stronger protagonist, like Rosalind in “As You Like It.”
“I think that her early work with Cal Shakes, with me and watching those actors onstage and various other teachers, taught her the value of how to do the work, how to get into that text, how to understand the people around you, how to harness what her natural tendencies and qualities are,” Tillman says.
Eventually, Zendaya started auditioning for main stage roles, getting cast in “Caroline, or Change” at TheatreWorks in 2008 and “Once on This Island” at Berkeley Playhouse in 2009.
“In she came, and I think she was 10 years old,” recalls TheatreWorks founding Artistic Director Robert Kelley, who directed “Caroline.” “I just looked up, and there was the most striking human being I had ever seen in my whole life.”
Before she got the part, as one of the title character’s sons, Kelley had a special callback just for Zendaya, where he worked with the costume department to see if “this unique creature” could pass as a boy. ( A wig and coveralls did the trick.)
He explains Zendaya’s charm, charisma and look this way: “It’s something that catches you immediately and somehow must have had an influence on that person’s life,” Kelley says. “They bring the experience of people reacting to them into the room automatically, not by choice. ... Along with it is a joy of life that can project. Everybody in the room just goes, ‘ whoa.’ ”
Kimberly Dooley, executive director and producer at Berkeley Playhouse, directed Zendaya in the title role of Little Ti Moune in “Once on This Island,” in which she was the only child actor in the production.
“She has this mixture of old soul energy and really spirited youthful fierce energy,” Dooley says. “It’s about a presence, an ability to look in your eyes and listen and be reflective and take notes and incorporate them and perform those notes, which can be really hard for kids, so I was impressed right away that she could do that. There’s something like a steadiness in her — a strong, calm center that she had even as a kid.”
Stoermer concurs with the “old soul” assessment. She says some of Zendaya’s relatives have long affectionately called her “Grandma.”
Clive Worsley, now Cal Shakes’ director of artistic learning, then a teaching artist, remembers coaching Zendaya on the monologue she used from “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” to audition for the Oakland School for the Arts and later “Shake It Up” on the Disney Channel.
“I will always remember being in her living room in Emeryville with Kazembe ( Ajamu Coleman, Zendaya’s father),” Worsley says. “After a few runthroughs, we were finally able to get to a place where she was just having fun with it and loosening up and allowing herself to discover something new in that monologue in the moment. ... As a teacher or director of young actors, you always relish that moment where they’re able to unlock something for themselves and find their own creative freedom or give themselves finally the permission to truly interpret a piece of text for themselves.”
Worsley says he’s worked with “hundreds and hundreds” of young actors, and whether someone lands a role is secondary to him compared with how that young artist felt about the audition.
“Did you feel good about the work that you just did?” he says. “That’s the place that I want young people to live.”
With that audition monologue, he says, “it was super engaging to watch her embody this young woman who was discovering the wonder of this concept of atoms, reeling in the magnitude of the universe and your place in it.”
Now, when he watches Zendaya’s work in “Euphoria,” he’s struck by her maturity. “There’s a gravitas in there. There’s a bravery to go to very dark and very vulnerable places that are not easy for any actor, particularly an actor in their early 20s, to be able to access.” Many other actors at that age might not have the life experience to access those depths, he says, “but clearly she has.”
“What I know about Zendaya and going to deep emotional places is that she has to go to something that she’s experienced in order to cry,” Stoermer says. “Some actors, they can just imagine something. … Zendaya can’t do that.”
When Stoermer watches the show, “it affects me in a different way,” she says. I know what emotions she’s pulling up. I don’t think of her as Rue and that character; I don’t cry for Rue. I cry for the emotion that I know she’s had to bring up and what she’s been through as Zendaya.”