The actress appeared virtually on ‘The Late Show’ on Tuesday, where she also discussed throwing dance parties while shooting ‘Dune.’
Appearing on The Late Show Tuesday night, Dune star Zendaya was asked straight up if she’s as excited about the movie as the “Dune-nerds,” a group that host Stephen Colbert proudly identifies with.
“I’m geeking out like everyone else, I can’t wait to see it,” said the actress who plays the Fremen character Chani in Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel, which due to the pandemic has had its release date pushed back to Oct. 1.
Zendaya had nothing but good things to say about her Dune co-star Timothee Chalamet (who plays the lead role of Paul Atreides in the film) adding that the actor had become one of her closest friends. “He’s lovely and so talented.” She talked about having dance parties where Timothee would come in with music playing on his speaker. Colbert guessed that the best dancer in the cast would be Javier Bardem. “He had the moves, I was very impressed,” said Zendaya.
To pass the time in quarantine, Zendaya said that she identified a need to do more physical activity. So, she ended up wearing different wigs and entertaining her assistant in different characters, which would sometimes be filmed on a phone outdoors. One of the wigs was something she ahd worn the wig to the Met ball. “It’s motivating, it got me outside.”
Colbert referred to her new film Malcolm & Marie as a “rarity,” having been conceived, written, shot and edited entirely amid the COVID pandemic. Zendaya said that the project came about from an urge to remain creative. “Is there a world where we could shoot something in my house” she would ask director Sam Levinson, with whom she had worked on Euphoria with.
Among the early ideas for the film was a psychological thriller where Zendaya thinks she’s still on the Disney channel. As the actress explained to Colbert, that idea might be more suitable for when she’s in her forties.
Levinson then came up with the idea for Malcolm & Marie. “He was only like fifteen pages in when he thought he would bring up the idea to John David Washington,” she recalled.
Zendaya described the movie as a play with two characters who come home — one is a filmmaker who had forgotten to thank his partner after a screening — and the story explores the aftermath of that. “Chaos ensues and we don’t know the fate of the relationship,” she shared.
The film was shot with the skeleton cast and crew quarantined together, and Zendaya brought her own makeup and clothes. “Everyone was doing like four jobs at once,” she said. There was no assistant director or script supervisor, so every scene was shot in sequence. “Everybody had each other’s backs.”
Now Zendaya is in Atlanta doing Spider-Man 3. “I know you can’t tell me anything, that is a blind alley to go down,” said Colbert.
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