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I want her to be able to think on her feet. I want her to be just as smart as everybody else. I want her to be able to do everything that a guy can do. There are other things that a girl can be.” Zendaya issued some final requirements: “I want her to be martial arts–trained. I didn’t want them to all of a sudden be like, ‘Oh, yeah, and then she sings this episode!’ No. There were other conditions: “I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t good at singing or acting or dancing. That’s gonna change.’ ” She then rejected her character’s name (“Do I look like a Katy to you?”) and insisted that the show feature a family of color. Next she objected to the show’s title, which at the time was Super Awesome Katy. First they would need to make her a producer. Undercover, she decided, Disney would need to meet demands. By this time she had already completed her first Disney show, Shake It Up, in which she costarred as an aspiring dancer alongside Bella Thorne. “I got in a room with the heads of Disney Channel,” Zendaya says, recounting a meeting that took place four years ago, when she was sixteen. Now, for the first time, I get a glimpse of the take-no-prisoners, suffer-no-fools businesswoman her family and inner circle frequently describe. Zendaya often plays the clown, teasing her dad, her assistant, Darnell, and especially her stylist, Law Roach, with uncanny impressions. She sits down on a tufted sofa next to Ajamu and orders cauliflower rice and a ginger ale. If I didn’t know that minutes ago she was swinging from a chain, I might take her for a stylish first-year med student. She is tall, five feet ten, with curly hair that she’ll soon pile into a topknot. Zendaya explains it herself when she arrives at Soho House, unnoticed in sweats and a cardigan. You need to appreciate how she changed the Disney game. To really understand how Zendaya got here, her father says, you have to go back to 2013. And jaws dropped at this year’s Met gala when she appeared on the stairs of the Metropolitan Museum as a tropical disco princess, wearing a Dolce & Gabbana Alta Moda ball gown rendered in parrot print, a bold tangerine lip, and an enormous Afro. Not only does Zendaya love fashion but she understands that you can play a role when you get dressed.” In Dolce & Gabbana’s spring campaign, she was a tambourine-playing, sneaker-wearing Carmen Miranda on the shores of Capri. Michael Kors, who calls her “fashion-fearless,” helped transform her into an intergalactic Cher for last year’s Met gala. (Her mother, Claire Stoermer, is also a teacher.) Ajamu is tall and sturdy, in jeans and a navy sweatshirt, with thin shoulder-length dreadlocks pulled into a half ponytail.Īre there any grades left to skip? Designers swooped Zendaya up long ago. When the elevator opens onto Soho House’s lobby, I walk straight into our date for the evening: Zendaya’s father, Kazembe Ajamu, a 64-year-old former P.E. “She’s swinging from a chain right now,” he explains politely. Darnell is calling to say she is running late a fight scene is taking longer than expected. Undercover, in which she plays a teen spy who is both a math whiz and a black belt in karate.

#KC UNDERCOVER CLOTHING LINE MOVIE#

Though Zendaya is making her movie debut this summer in one of the season’s biggest blockbusters, Spider-Man: Homecoming, she is also still filming the Disney sitcom that planted her in the hearts of little tomboys everywhere- K.C. IT’S A SPRING NIGHT in Hollywood, and I’m driving down Sunset to meet Zendaya when my phone rings. Not only has Zendaya managed to transition from Disney stardom straight into blockbuster movies, but she’s done it before her Disney days are even over.

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