Here's How Zendaya Got 'Cut' To Play A Rising Tennis Star In 'Challengers'

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Fans are love-loving Zendaya in Challengers, director Luca Guadagnino’s buzzy new tennis drama. But playing ruthless superstar Tashi Duncan didn’t come easy for the Emmy winner.

Before she became a Challengers producer and star, Zendaya’s tennis knowledge was limited to a handful of mega-stars, per Vogue. (Think: Roger Federer and the Williams sisters.) So naturally, she went to the best to brush up on her basics: Brad Gilbert, an Olympic bronze medalist and former ATP tour player. He’s also coached Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick, Andy Murray, and—oh, yeah—Coco Guaff.

Brad, along with his wife Kim Gilbert (who served as a consultant on the film), worked with Zendaya for months to craft everything from her swing to her serve. The play styles of the other main characters—Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig and Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson—were more drawn-out in Justin Kuritzkes’ script, with Art being described as a more “classic” competitor while Patrick is more daring. But for Tashi, all the team had to go on was her passion, Brad tells Women’s Health.

“We knew about Z being a ‘killer,’ but her game wasn’t really defined on how it was going to be,” he says. “Luca [Guadagnino] just wanted to see and feel that intensity.”

Below, Brad tells WH how he, Luca, and Zendaya created the perfect Tashi Duncan, from her workouts to the real-life inspirations behind her play.

Zendaya studied tennis greats.

To create the ultimate crash course, Kim sent Zendaya tapes of some of the most iconic champs so the actress could form her style. Since the script called Tashi an aggressive competitor, Kim made sure to include taller, leaner players with powerful strokes, like Naomi Osaka, Venus Williams, and Maria Sharapova.

But Brad says that Zendaya really became inspired while watching college games at Pepperdine, his alma mater. They attended two matches and the star was transfixed.

“One of ’em was over five hours, and Z didn’t want to leave until it was over,” he says. “I think that really opened her eyes to seeing what a live match was all about.”

She had six weeks to train alongside her co-stars.

The film deals with a love triangle and fierce competition among the three actors, so it makes sense that they all prepped together, too. After Zendaya and Mike trained together for three months in Malibu, California, Josh joined the group for six weeks of rehearsal in Boston, Brad says.

The regimen was intense: The actors would leave their hotels at 6 a.m. to be on courts in the suburbs by 7 a.m. First, Brad would lead the group in two hours of tennis practice before the actors hit the gym for two hours with strength and conditioning coach Bryan Doo. The trio then had a break for lunch, and the afternoon was set aside for rehearsing lines and going over their characters.

“They had long days,” Brad recalls. “They all put in the hard yards to make this happen.”

During practice, each actor trained on a separate court with a coach. They’d shadow the movements of individual points, which Brad and Luca had written out, labeled, and timed.

“We would literally [go], ‘Okay, let's practice the body movements of this six-ball rally. We would number the points: ‘No. 26, boom, let’s work on that today. Let’s work on the movements and choreograph it together. This is how the point is going to play out,’” he says. “I think that helped the actors [to say], ‘This is what I need to do for each one of these points.’”

Zendaya struggled at the beginning of training, telling Vogue she was “trying to just hit the f*cking thing” at first. But once they began practicing without the tennis ball, things began to click for the star.

She ultimately likened it to a dance routine, reminiscent of her early successes on Disney's Shake It Up and ABC’s Dancing With the Stars. Brad recalled the exact moment when it “sunk in,” while they were training at the Weymouth Club in Weymouth, Massachusetts.

"I started treating it more like dance, like, 'Okay, it’s more copying mannerisms, copying footwork, whatever.' So everything then became shadowing,” Zendaya told Vogue. She would watch her body double hit a ball, and then mimic her movements. "The ball comes in post, so why am I so stressed about hitting this ball, or this ball hitting me?"

"That kind of became my entryway into looking like a tennis player because I knew that at some point I wasn't going to be one, but I could fake it," she later added in a press conference, per Business Insider.

She got more 'cut' to play Tashi.

All three actors had specific fitness goals they wanted to achieve to look most like their characters. Josh was supposed to “lean down,” while Mike consumed 10,000 calories a day to gain muscle. “Literally at five in the morning, he was eating an eight-egg omelet,” Brad says. “Halfway through practice, he’d be eating, because he was burning too many calories.”

Meanwhile, Zendaya was supposed to get more “cut” to play powerful tennis star Tashi, according to Brad. (While promoting 2017's The Greatest Showman, the actress said that she doesn't "have" upper body strength.)

“They wanted her to be lean and strong,” Brad explains. “She did whatever you asked her to do. She's incredibly humble and gracious and hardworking, dedicated. She's just a quality human being.”

She developed her mental game.

Zendaya developed Tashi’s fortitude during the hours of practice in Massachusetts, according to Brad. And she, Josh, and Mike really clocked in when filming began, he says.

“It’s kind of like the difference between being a college tennis player and a pro tennis player—you could see in their acting [that] once it's go time, they elevate to another level,” he said. “Each one of 'em is conscious: ‘I got to be able to do my part, otherwise we gotta reshoot it again.’”

But Brad could tell that Z was in it to win it from the beginning. After a “good hard practice” in Malibu, Brad mentioned that many tennis players swear by cold plunges for recovery.

And, even though the Pacific Ocean couldn’t have been warmer than “57 degrees,” Zendaya jumped in, no questions asked.

“She looked at me like I was crazy, but she went and did it…there was nobody there. No fanfare, nothing. She just did it,” he recalls. “She’s totally salt of the earth. She’s great people.”

Her training inspired Brad’s work with Coco Gauff.

Before Challengers, Brad hadn’t coached at the elite level for nearly a decade, per the New York Times. But when the movie wrapped in 2022, he began looking for a new player to train, one that “shared his hunger,” the publication says.

Around a year later, he got a call from Coco's team, who was looking for some wisdom after losing in the first round of Wimbledon 2023. Since Brad joined Coco’s squad later that year, she went on to win the Mubadala Citi Open and the US Open.

Zendaya and Coco still haven’t met, though Brad says the actress “really wants” to. The same goes for the tennis star: Coco was “bummed” when she lost in the semi-finals of the 2024 Indian Wells Masters, since it meant she couldn’t meet Zendaya (who attended the finals), he says.

Now, Brad attributes some of his success with Coco to his work with Zendaya the prior year.

“I think maybe she prepared me in 2022 for being ready for Coco in 2023. Sometimes art imitates life,” he says. “My role as a coach in [Challengers] was to get them ready. In tennis, it’s to get your player ready for tournaments and the run…there’s a goal and a focus. We had a short period of time to make it happen. When we went to film, we were ready to rock.”

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