ali🩷

I stayed clean through the rest of the school year. I wish I could say that was a decision I made. In some ways, it was just easier. I don’t know if this feeling will last forever, but I am trying. I remember Ali said, “The thought of maybe being a good person is what keeps me trying to be a good person.” Maybe there’s something to that.

Exactlyyy

God, please let this kind of love find me. 🥹🙏🏾

But Nolan sees it differently: “We would be in the maddest, craziest situations, just all of us fighting the elements, tearing our hair out, all these things going on, and she would sort of parachute in from her other job with this sense of true grace and poise.” He says he sought out Zendaya for the role specifically because of that “iconic” grace: “I mean, she’s literally playing a goddess; it’s a tall order. She’s a true movie star, but also an incredible actor.”

Matt Damon, her costar in The Odyssey, agrees. “Chris is known for being very circumspect. So when you do a take, it’s not like he says, ‘That was great.’ He’ll go, ‘Yep, good. Okay.’ And that is the equivalent of the greatest praise you could ever get,” Damon says. “Zendaya, on the other hand—there were takes where she did one thing, she did this amazing scene, and he said, ‘Cut.’ And then he went, ‘Perfect.’ And literally, Tom [Holland] and I were obsessed with this. She got a ‘perfect’? I’ve never even gotten a ‘great.’ She got a ‘perfect’? He and I bitched about it for the entire rest of the film. ‘Did you get anything today?’ ‘No, I got a “good”—moving on.’ ‘Yeah, me too.’

“So it was this amazing ability she had to come in and really put herself in there and blow everybody away, and then just go back to shooting Euphoria,” Damon continues. “Look, you forget, she and Tom are very young actors and very accomplished for how young they are, but they’re still in their 20s.” (And by the way, he adds: “I absolutely adore her and Tom together, and they deserve each other—they’re the two loveliest people.”)

She worked with Holland on both The Odyssey and Brand New Day. They didn’t share scenes on the first film, so she was able to watch him on set. “I could have cried, I was so proud,” she says. “And then Spider-Man was a dream; I get to go to work every day with my best friend, the person that I love. We bring our dogs to work; it’s like a family affair. We grew up on those movies! It’s like coming home.”

While in Oakland, Zendaya and Holland also adopted another dog from a shelter, a pocket bully, bringing their total to three. “Logistically, it wasn’t probably the smartest idea,” she says. “But emotionally, it was. He’s a wonderful addition to our family. I saw his little face and I was like, ‘I can’t leave you behind.’”