Zendaya Got Advice From Timothée Chalamet Before Working With Luca Guadagnino on ‘Challengers’

Before teaming up with director Luca Guadagnino on Challengers, Zendaya sought advice from Dune co-star Timothée Chalamet, who starred in Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name in 2017.

“He said wonderful things,” Zendaya told The Hollywood Reporter at the Los Angeles premiere of Challengers on Tuesday. “Luca is brilliant and I’ve wanted to work with Luca for a very long time and this just seemed like the absolute perfect thing. When we first met about the script he had such a keen, deep understanding of the characters from the beginning and a clearer idea of the kind of movie he wanted to create. And the script was brilliant, [writer] Justin Kuritzkes is so talented and I’m so happy for him. So it all made sense.”

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Zendaya, also a producer on the film, stars as a former tennis prodigy now coaching her champion husband (played by Mike Faist), who is currently on a losing streak. To rebuild his confidence, she enters him in a Challenger tournament, where he faces off against his former best friend and her ex-boyfriend (Josh O’Connor).

Ahead of the L.A. screening, Zendaya — expressing her gratitude for those in the crowd as “I always think that nobody’s going to be at these things and then I’m so surprised when people are actually here” — said from the stage, “we hope you enjoy it and just have fun. Dance if you want to, because it will make you want to do that. And again, don’t judge the characters too hard.”

Guadagnino, noting the night marked the first major L.A. premiere of his career, also spoke to that dance element in his pre-screening introduction, as the scoring — from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross — is a major part of the movie.

“I wanted to put a song at the end of the credits and [Reznor and Ross] are very good because they don’t say anything, and then at the right moment they say, ‘What about a new song?’ OK!” the filmmaker teased. “I was on a plane leaving Los Angeles for Italy and I was thinking about somebody and started to write these lyrics, little thing, and forwarded them to Trent and said, ‘If you think this is a good lyric for the song maybe — it’s in the movie.’ Anyway, the miracles of cinema and of Hollywood.”

Guadagnino also shouted out his three stars as the “embodiment of Justin’s imagination, my imagination, the dream people that I wanted to work with for a long time.”

On the carpet, Faist also noted what onscreen love triangles he took inspiration from, pointing to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También.

And after Zendaya told THR at the film’s Rome premiere that using an intimacy coordinator on the project “was fantastic and very helpful, because it was important that we felt safe,” O’Connor also weighed in on the experience.

“It’s the first time I’ve worked with an intimacy coordinator. I think it’s very important, I think anything to make actors and not just actors but crew and everyone involved on the film set feel comfortable around intimacy is a great thing,” The Crown star said. “I’m all for it and I think it was really handy.”

Challengers hits theaters on April 26.

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