Zendaya says she’s done with one-dimensional movie roles for women

Zendaya, real name Zendaya Maree Stoerman Coleman, has admitted to turning down female roles that are one-dimensional and only serve the purpose of helping the male character.

She shared her views on the subject in an interview with GQ, having appeared on the cover of the magazine’s February edition. 

ZENDAYA ON ONE-DIMENSIONAL ROLES TO BOOST MALE CHARACTER 

Despite equality gains over the years, including in the film industry, women are often still cast in films primarily to help the male character build and grow, and with less of a story of their own. Zendaya is opposed to this and opened up about the roles she recently turned down.

In her interview with GQ, she said the scripts for female roles she had been receiving were all one-dimensional. The female character too often served the purpose of helping the male character get where he needed to be, but did not have a story of her own. 

 “It’s not necessarily that any of [the scripts] were bad or something like that, I just felt like a lot of the roles that I was reading, specifically female roles, were just like, I could have played them all as the same person and it wouldn’t have mattered, if that makes sense,” Zendaya said. 

“The best way to describe it is just like, they’d usually serve the purpose of helping the male character get to where they need to go, do what they need to do. They don’t really have an arc of their own,” she explained. 

She said such roles would not result in any personal growth as an actress and did not challenge her. 

“And they usually feel very one-dimensional in the sense that there’s not a lot of layers to them, meaning they all seem very kind of like the same person over and over and over again. It would have been great and it would have been fine, but I wouldn’t have grown at all” she added. 

ZENDAYA’S GQ COVER SHOOT 

Harry Styles recently made headlines for wearing a dress on the cover of Vogue and now Zendaya is also shattering gender stereotypes with her GQ cover. Zendaya was styled in menswear by Law Roach and photographed by Tyrell Hampton.

Here are some of the pictures from Zendaya’s cover shoot.

ZENDAYA’S NEW FILM: WHAT MAKES ‘MALCOLM AND MARIE’ DIFFERENT 

Zendaya’s upcoming film, Malcolm and Marie, also stars John David Washington. It will be shown on Netflix and is billed as a relationship quarantine movie.

The film offered the former Disney Channel star turned blockbuster heavyweight the chance to portray more than just a passive, afterthought girlfriend. She said she was also able to use her character, Marie, as a vessel to let out emotions she had kept pent up. 

“I don’t yell. I’m not a very argumentative person, but it’s nice to just release s**t and be able to, I don’t know… I guess emote would be the word? To just use her as this vessel to just get shit out that maybe I had pent up or hadn’t said,” Zendaya told GQ.