Challengers: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor put trust in director for film akin to tornado on tennis court

The trailer for Challengers, ostensibly a tennis movie, broke the internet last year when it featured superstar Zendaya seemingly about to engage in a menage a trois with co-stars Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor. For Zendaya, who is fast on her way to being Hollywood’s next mogul, there was always an element of risk involved in working with Italian director Luca Guadagnino, who specialises in sensual and morally complex films. In the 2017 drama Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino cast Timothee Chalamet as the underage lover of an older man. The director collaborated again with Chalamet in 2022 on Bones And All, in which the Canadian actor was tasked with playing cinema’s sexiest cannibal. So, Zendaya, who has a producer credit on Challengers, knew what she was getting into. “Luca is brilliant,” the 27-year-old says. “He knows what he’s doing, you know, and there’s such a trust in his taste and what his vision is also for the characters. “It was apparent from my first meeting with him that he really understood (the characters), and their connection and their love and their lust.” That lust is rendered in vivid fashion in the aforementioned scene, with Zendaya, Faist and O’Connor playing teen tennis prodigies, who share a three-way kiss in a hotel room. When the trailer dropped it launched an avalanche of memes, mostly featuring Zendaya’s real-life boyfriend and Spider-Man co-star, Tom Holland, in tears. “Tom Holland has no reason to cry, trust me,” Faist assures STM. Far from being gratuitous, O’Connor believes the scene, which happens early in Challengers, is a statement of intent from the director, and instructional for the audience to help them understand what is to come. “It’s very apparent from the beginning that the love and attraction and lust (these three characters) have for each other is unanimous, you know, and I think the point is that the three of them are bound together from the start,” O’Connor explains. “That scene where it’s like a sort of three-way kiss, and then (Zendaya’s character is enjoying observing), I just think that puts them in this tornado together, which allows for them to be incredibly nasty to each other, and act badly and act brilliantly and compete and push each other.” O’Connor, who played Prince Charles in The Crown, is right about the tornado. There’s an inexorable, pulsating momentum that drives the plot of Challengers, as sure as a Roger Federer forehand. The love triangle at the centre of the film unfolds over a little more than a decade, jumping back and forth between the present day and the past of the three lead characters. At the centre is Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, once considered the next big thing of the tennis world, only to have all that promise dashed by a career-ending injury. In the present day story arc we find Tashi living her tennis dream vicariously as the coach of her husband, Art Donaldson (Faist), a champion who is stumbling to the end of a storied career. Physically and mentally fatigued, Art’s willingness to hang up the racquet is a source of frustration and even disgust to Tashi, who resents the fact he gets to choose how he goes out. When a final US Open appearance for Art beckons, Tashi decides to motivate her struggling hubby by entering him in a challenger tournament, which will see the famed tennis star pitted against nobodies. Only thing is, one of the competitors in this challenger tournament is far from a nobody — it is Art’s estranged former best friend, Patrick (O’Connor), who also happens to be Tashi’s former lover. Thus reuniting the hotel room threesome, with an adulthood of water (and emotional baggage) under the bridge. The fact Tashi would deliberately put her husband in such a compromising situation — and it gets much worse than what you’ve just read — speaks volumes for the character. “She’s unlikable, you know,” Zendaya admits. “And like you judge her immediately, and think she’s too much. “Ultimately, while she’s ruthless, there is something to her and I think it’s grief; grief of a career and a life that she never got to live. “And I think her one true love was always tennis, and she was trying whatever she can to be close to it, to touch it, to do it, and so she uses people to get that feeling, because she can’t do it anymore on her own.” But, as with all of Guadagnino’s films, there’s a lot more nuance to it than that, and the former Disney child star had to bring her A-game to a role she is still trying to process. “I think she enjoys power in a way that I don’t think I would ever be comfortable with,” Zendaya says. “I don’t want to relate too much to her, you know, but I say don’t judge her, because I think that upon first viewing, you’ll have an opinion. “And then you watch it again, and I guarantee that opinion will change, and then you watch it again and it might change again. “Every time I watch it, I’m like, ‘Tashi, girl, what are you doing?’, and the next thing I’m like, ‘actually, she didn’t do anything wrong, and it was Art all along’ . . . so, every time, I’m angry at a different character, or I feel more passionate about a different character, or I feel heartbroken — it constantly changes.” Faist, who was a scene-stealer in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 adaptation of the musical West Side Story, has a different interpretation when asked who the villain of Challengers is. “They’re all pretty bad,” he jokes. “In a movie like this, the alliances kind of keep shifting, and, at the end of the day, you see everybody at their best at the beginning of the film, and then how it all just starts to morph into something else for each individual. “And that is everybody’s insecurities playing out, or their egos playing out, or what have you, and it’s all just very naturally human.” In case you’re wondering, the movie does actually contain a lot of tennis, with the plot unfolding during a winner-takes-all game between Art and Patrick, with Tashi watching from side of court. In the flashbacks you also see Zendaya on centre court, and the three actors do astonishingly well at looking like tennis stars. Given Faist was the only one who went into the project as an accomplished player — the American is a natural athlete and excels at every sport he tries his hand at — his co-stars joked with STM that it meant their performances required much more acting skill. “That’s debatable,” Faist deadpans. But there can be no debating how well Guadagnino captured the on-court action, and the hilariously camp but effective decision to set said action against a backdrop of driving techno beats by the Oscar-winning duo of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. It’s even more incredible when you consider the director knew very little about the sport. “I remember all of us sitting around and Luca was like, ‘Wait, so what are these lines? Where do you stand?’, and we would write out little maps and be like, ‘OK, so he goes here, and the ball goes here’,” Zendaya reveals. “So, for someone who really started (with no idea), he very quickly understood how to capture the game, and really did it in a way that felt very emotional as well; we never are disconnected from any one of these characters throughout their match. “You just feel immersed inside of this game, and you can feel the sweat, and you can feel their heartbeat.” The star of the Dune franchise isn’t joking about the sweat — there’s a laughably egregious amount of it, which Guadagnino improbably uses to fetishise the tennis action, provided a counterpoint to the off-court romance. “Luca has always had this eye for, and kind of an instinct, to push that desire and how to tell desire in ways that are less than obvious and intriguing,” O’Connor agrees. “The tennis is sexy . . . that’s the sort of intimacy.” “All Luca was saying (during the tennis scenes), from my perspective, was just screaming, ‘More sweat’,” Faist adds. In other hands this project could have been a disaster, and, even still, it might be uncomfortable for some people (who haven’t seen Guadagnino’s previous films). But this is where the security of being a producer gave Zendaya confidence. “For me, it’s always been a way to be creative in a different sense,” she says. “I was always a shy kid, and so the more I do this, the more I love moving behind the camera, I love being able to learn from people and grow from different directors . . . and problem solving and figuring out how things work. “And I learned quite early, when I was younger, that being able to have a real title (like producer) allows you to be able to protect yourself in a lot of different spaces . . . because it allows for you to be like, ‘actually, this is what’s happening, and I can be part of this conversation’, so it also allows me to protect my work and myself and people around me.” And now she and her castmates hope that work is appreciated for what it is. “What stuck out to me when I first read the script was this was a story about what it means to be an artist,” Faist says. “You have this passion, and you have this joy and this love for something, and you pursue it blindly, with so much focus and tenacity, and, then after some time, it can get skewed, and your joy is somewhat fading away, or it gets tainted in some capacity. “And you have to fight like hell to hold on to the joy and the purity of it all.” “We say it’s ‘Co-dependency: The Movie’,” Zendaya laughs. “And I think that’s what it’s about, I also think it’s about a million things, and I think tennis is the metaphor that we use to express that. “I’ve watched it with family and people who are not tennis people and don’t really understand how tennis works, and they still feel like they’re inside the match and there’s something kind of alive and that they can follow and it makes sense to them. “Hopefully, people who do really care about tennis will not be distracted by any of our imperfect forms, and will also be able to enjoy it and feel connected in their own personal way, so I hope it’s for everyone.” Challengers, like most of Guadagnino’s movies, is probably not for everyone, but that’s precisely what makes his films compulsory viewing. And, with Zendaya serving up another ace as the leading lady, it’s game, set and match. Challengers is in theatres April 24.

Challengers: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor put trust in director for film akin to tornado on tennis court

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