Zendaya is thinking back on her upbringing and how it has affected her perspective on her childhood from an adult one.
"I don’t know how much of a choice I had," the Challengers actress, 27, told Vogue and British Vogue for the magazines' shared May cover profile. "I have complicated feelings about kids and fame and being in the public eye, or being a child actor."
"We’ve seen a lot of cases of it being detrimental," she continued. "I think only now, as an adult, am I starting to go, Oh, okay, wait a minute: I’ve only ever done what I’ve known, and this is all I’ve known."
Zendaya continued, stating that she feels like she's "almost going through my angsty teenager phase now because I didn't really have the time to do it before." Zendaya began her career in show business on Disney's Shake It Up and went on to score her breakthrough film role in Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017.
"I felt like I was thrust into a very adult position: I was becoming the breadwinner of my family very early, and there was a lot of role-reversal happening, and just kind of becoming grown, really," she explained.
Zendaya told Vogue that she felt like she needed to be “this perfect being, and be everything that everyone needs me to be, and live up to all these expectations.”
“Now, when I have these moments in my career — like, my first time leading a film that’s actually going to be in a theatre — I feel like I shrink, and I can’t enjoy all the things that are happening to me,“ she said. "I’m very tense, and I think that I carry that from being a kid and never really having an opportunity to just try s---."
"And I wish I went to school," the Euphoria star added.