Zendaya has revealed the details behind her three-way kiss in Challengers with her co-stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.
The buzzy movie starred Zendaya as Tashi, a former tennis star who had to leave the profession because she suffered an injury early in her career.
Mike plays her husband Art, whom she molds into a tennis star, while Josh plays her ex-boyfriend Patrick, another tennis player.
When Art and Patrick find themselves playing each other during the ATP Challenger Tour, a sizzling love triangle forms between them and Tashi.
Challengers became a social media sensation for the electric sexual chemistry between the leads – particularly a kissing scene involving all three of them.
Now, in an Actors On Actors interview with Nicole Kidman, Zendaya has lifted the curtain on the process of shooting the scene, via Variety.
The subject came up when the actresses were talking about the difference between playing a scene spontaneously or acting according to a pre-decided plan.
‘You can tell if someone’s thinking about what they’re going to say or what they’re going to do with their hand,’ said Zendaya.
‘I’ve caught myself doing that, when you dissociate mid-take. Or you start thinking: “Why did I just do that with my eye? That was a really weird choice,”’ she dished.
She shared that she has been ‘asked a lot about the three-way kiss scene’ in Challengers – and revealed how she responds.
Zendaya tells inquirers: ‘”Really, it’s a four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-, nine-way kiss,” because there’s so many people. There’s a camera coming at us at a certain time.’
She spilled: ‘I know that when I go from Mike to Josh, when the camera comes in, I gotta move back. There’s so many things at play.’
As for her real love life, Zendaya is still in the throes of her longtime romance with her fellow international superstar Tom Holland.
Zendaya and Tom were the subject of dating rumors since they wrapped Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, their first movie together.
However she repeatedly denied that they were an item for years before they confirmed that they were romantically involved in 2021.
‘He’s literally one of my best friends,’ Zendaya said during a 2017 interview, shortly after the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming.
‘This past how many months we’ve had to do press tours together. There’s very few people that will understand what that’s like at 20 years old,’ she told Variety.
Indeed both Zendaya and Tom have reportedly dated other people in the years between when the rumors started and when the romance was confirmed.
Zendaya was linked to her Euphoria co-star Jacob Elordi in 2019, while Tom was said to have gone into COVID-19 lockdown with English actress Nadia Parkes in 2020.
However in July 2021, Tom and Zendaya became public as a couple when they were spotted kissing in a car after paying a visit to her mother.
Since then, the pair have not shied away from being seen together, but they have been reticent to discuss the details of their relationship in public.
Tom shed some light on their tight-lipped stance last year when he appeared on a podcast hosted by the self-help guru Jay Shetty.
‘My relationship is the thing I keep most sacred. I don’t talk about it,’ he said. ‘I try my best to keep it as private as possible.’
He explained: ‘We both feel like that is the healthiest way for us to move on as a couple, so I do try to keep as removed from Hollywood as possible.’
‘Our relationship is something that we are incredibly protective of and we want to keep as sacred as possible,’ he told The Hollywood Reporter the same year.
‘We don’t think that we owe it to anyone, it’s our thing, and it has nothing to do with our careers,’ the The Crowded Room actor added.
