by Tim Gordon
Zendaya top films are in theaters this weekend with The Drama. Before the A24 release, TheFilmGordon looks back at the five performances that define her extraordinary rise, and why her best work may still be ahead of her.
Zendaya top films tell the story of one of the most deliberate and impressive career pivots in recent Hollywood history. At 29, she has moved from Disney Channel star to two-time Emmy winner to prestige cinema’s most in-demand actress, and this weekend she arrives in The Drama, an A24 dark romantic comedy opposite Robert Pattinson. She plays Emma Harwood, a bookstore clerk whose engagement is thrown into crisis by a confession that nobody, including the audience, sees coming. It is exactly the kind of bold, performance-centered project that has defined her choices since she decided, quietly but decisively, that she was going to be taken seriously.
Before The Drama, before Euphoria Season 3 arrives on HBO in just a few weeks, and before a year that will also include Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and Dune: Part Three, TheFilmGordon looks back at the Zendaya top films that built one of the most compelling careers in Hollywood today.
No. 5 — Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Nobody knew it at the time, but Homecoming was the first of the Zendaya top films to hint at something much larger. Her MJ was introduced as a peripheral character, dry and watchful, someone who observed the chaos around her without being consumed by it. It was a small role that she played with more specificity than it required.
What Homecoming established was a quality that would define every great Zendaya performance: the ability to do more with less. She did not overplay the role. She let the character breathe. And in doing so, she made MJ the most interesting person in the room every time she walked into it.
The MCU would eventually give her more to work with, but this is where the instinct was first visible.
No. 4 — Dune: Part Two (2024)
Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two gave Zendaya the most physically and emotionally demanding blockbuster role of her career to date, and she met every demand. Chani is the moral conscience of the Dune saga, a woman who watches someone she loves transform into something she does not recognize, and cannot stop it from happening.
What Zendaya brought to Chani in the second film was grief in real time. The performance is not showy. It is precise. Every scene she shares with Timothee Chalamet carries the weight of a love story that the audience wants to work out even as the film makes clear it cannot.
Dune: Part Three promises to expand Chani’s role considerably. After what Zendaya delivered in Part Two, that expansion feels not just deserved but essential. It is a performance that belongs in any serious conversation about Zendaya top films.
No. 3 — Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
No Way Home asked Zendaya to do something the previous Spider-Man films had not: carry genuine emotional weight in the middle of a massive multiverse spectacle. She did it without breaking a sweat.
The scene late in the film, the one that audiences did not see coming and will not forget, confirmed that Zendaya had grown into something the franchise needed badly. She was no longer the sharp-tongued observer from Homecoming. She was the emotional anchor of the entire story. The audience felt her loss because she made them feel it, not because the script told them to.
It remains the best dramatic work in the MCU’s Spider-Man trilogy, and it belongs entirely to her.
No. 2 — Challengers (2024)
If Euphoria made the industry take Zendaya seriously, Challengers made them understand what she was actually capable of. Among Zendaya top films, this one shifted the entire conversation.
Luca Guadagnino’s tennis drama is a film about desire, competition, and the way certain relationships never fully resolve no matter how much time passes. Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan is the center of everything, a former player turned coach whose influence over two men shapes the entire architecture of the story. She plays Tashi at multiple ages and emotional registers, and never loses the thread between them.
Challengers is the performance that crystallized what had been building for years. Zendaya is not just a star who can act. She is an actress who can carry a film on pure presence and intelligence, without a superhero suit, without a franchise, and without a safety net. Just the role and what she brings to it.
No. 1 — Malcolm and Marie (2021)
This is the one that people underestimate, and it is the one that matters most in any ranking of Zendaya top films.
Shot in black and white during the pandemic with a two-person cast, Malcolm and Marie is an unrelenting two-hander about a filmmaker and his girlfriend in the hours after his premiere, as every tension in their relationship surfaces one by one. There is nowhere to hide in a film like this. No action sequences, no ensemble to share the weight, no visual spectacle to absorb the audience’s attention. Just Zendaya and John David Washington in a house, in real time, saying things that hurt.
She is extraordinary in it. The performance has urgency, vulnerability, and control in equal measure. Every emotion is earned. Every shift in the dynamic between the two characters registers on her face before it registers in the dialogue.
Malcolm and Marie is the film that proved, beyond any reasonable argument, that Zendaya is not just of this moment. She is built for the long run.
Euphoria and the Road to The Drama
No conversation about Zendaya top films and television work is complete without Euphoria. As Rue Bennett, the teenager at the center of HBO’s unflinching portrait of addiction and adolescence, she delivered performances across two seasons that were not just good television. They were some of the finest dramatic acting of the last decade in any medium.
The Emmy she won, twice, was the industry recognizing what audiences already knew. Rue is a character who could have been destroyed by easy sentiment or cheap redemption arcs. Zendaya played her as a fully human person, brilliant and self-destructive and heartbreaking, without ever asking the audience for sympathy she had not earned.
Season 3 arrives on HBO in just a few weeks. After everything Euphoria has built, the expectations are enormous. Based on everything Zendaya has done since, those expectations are not unreasonable.
What Makes Her Exceptional: The Craft Behind the Career
Stardom is easy to see. Craft is harder to name. But if you want to understand why Zendaya top films keep getting better and why directors like Denis Villeneuve, Luca Guadagnino, and Christopher Nolan keep calling, you have to go beyond the roles and look at what she is actually doing inside them.
Start with her economy of performance. Zendaya almost never overplays a moment. Where lesser actors reach for the emotion and announce it, she withholds just enough to make the audience lean in. That restraint is a skill most actors spend decades trying to develop. She arrived with it.
Equally impressive is her physical intelligence. Watch how she moves in Challengers versus Dune versus Euphoria. Tashi Duncan carries her body like someone who lost the one thing that defined her. Chani moves like someone raised in a desert who trusts the ground beneath her feet. Rue barely holds herself upright most of the time. Each character has a distinct physical grammar that she builds from the ground up, before a single line of dialogue is spoken.
Beyond the physical, she listens on screen in a way that most actors never master. Great acting is as much about receiving as delivering. In her best scenes, particularly in Malcolm and Marie and No Way Home, you can watch her process what the other actor is giving her in real time. That responsiveness is what creates genuine chemistry rather than two people waiting for their turn to speak.
What separates her most, though, is emotional specificity without sentimentality. Rue Bennett could have been a tearjerker performance built entirely on the audience’s sympathy. Zendaya refused that. She played Rue’s addiction with unflinching precision, the manipulation, the self-deception, the flashes of genuine self-awareness that make the character’s choices even more devastating. She never asked the audience to feel sorry for Rue. She made them understand her. Those are very different things, and very few actresses know the difference.
Running through all of it is something harder to teach than any technique: intelligence reads on camera. There is a quality in her best work, the sense that the character is always thinking, not just reacting, that separates her from actresses who are simply compelling presences. You believe Tashi Duncan is strategically brilliant because Zendaya’s eyes are always doing the math. You believe Chani sees through Paul before he sees through himself for the same reason. The mind behind the performance is always visible, and that is what keeps the audience watching long after the scene has made its point.
These qualities did not arrive all at once. They have deepened with every role, which is exactly what makes what comes next so compelling.
The Natalie Portman Parallel
Every generation produces one actress whose arc redefines what a career can look like. For this generation, that actress is Zendaya. But to understand where she is headed, it helps to look at where someone else has already been.
The most direct historical comp for Zendaya top films and career arc, measured in age and intention, is Natalie Portman.
The parallels are specific and striking. Both started in franchise work as teenagers, Portman in Star Wars, Zendaya in the MCU, and used those platforms as launchpads rather than ceilings. Both made a conscious and deliberate pivot toward prestige work while still in their twenties. Both chose directors over franchises at the critical turning point of their careers. And both carry an unusual quality of intelligence on screen that critics and audiences respond to even before they fully understand why.
Portman’s Closer and Garden State are the equivalent of Zendaya’s Malcolm and Marie and Challengers, the films where the industry stopped seeing the franchise star and started seeing the actress. Portman won her Oscar at 29 for Black Swan. Zendaya is 29 now, with The Drama, Euphoria Season 3, and a Christopher Nolan film all arriving in the same calendar year.
The one meaningful difference, and it is an important one, is cultural weight. Portman carried the expectation of critical validation. Zendaya carries that plus the responsibility of representation, the Dorothy Dandridge dimension that Portman never had to navigate. Both women brought class, poise, and an uncommon seriousness of purpose to careers that lesser talents would have coasted on. Zendaya’s arc is not just comparable to Portman’s. It is arguably more layered, more complex, and more consequential.
What The Drama Tells Us About Where She Is Headed
The Drama is a deliberate choice. An A24 dark comedy with a director best known for Dream Scenario, a dark, cerebral film about identity and public perception. No franchise. No safety net. Just Zendaya, Robert Pattinson, and a premise built entirely around what the two of them can do in a room together.
It is exactly the kind of film a Hollywood titan makes when they have nothing left to prove and everything left to explore.
Zendaya top films have built a career that spans Disney, Marvel, A24, and prestige drama. She is 29 years old, with two Emmys and a year ahead that includes Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve. top films have built a career that spans Disney, Marvel, A24, and prestige drama. She is 29 years old, with two Emmys and a year ahead that includes Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve., Marvel, A24, and prestige drama, and a year ahead that includes Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve.
The Drama opens this weekend. Go see what the next chapter looks like.
