INNOVATORS

Zendaya

Shining Star

By Denis Villeneuve

To me, Zendaya is a thousand years old. She has already lived many lives before this one. And yet, she is as young as springtime. By some inextricable paradox, she also gives the impression of having been born sometime far into the future. She is timeless, and she can do it all.

In just the past year or so, Zendaya has radiated like a shooting star captured on celluloid in Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie. She emotionally exploded as her teenage years disintegrated in Levinson’s cultural phenomenon Euphoria. She shone in Spider-Man: No Way Home, a movie that dominated the box office in a year when she became the muse of extremes.

But Zendaya is much more than that. She is an autonomous creative force herself. A cultural icon in the making. A person driven by pure inspiration, empathy, and respect for her craft, who uses authenticity as a new superpower. She seems fearless, her roots run deep, and I love that she still laughs like a kid. Zendaya is the future. And there is nothing more comforting to me. This is only the beginning.

Villeneuve is a director, most recently of Dune

Taika Waititi

Hollywood Maverick

By Sacha Baron Cohen

You can tell that a film was made by Taika Waititi the same way you can tell a piece was painted by Picasso. Not in that he doesn’t know where on the face the eyes go, but in how he expresses his unique voice. The first work of Taika’s I saw was the 2014 mockumentary —a movie that could have been a disaster, but was amazing. It was brilliantly comic