Zendaya Wants to Make Space for Women
Zendaya is ready to bust down some doors. As ELLE celebrated its annual Women in Hollywood event Monday night at The Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, the 23-year-old actress and honoree took to the stage and gave a stirring acceptance speech that called upon the other women in the room: "Please continue to knock down doors," she said. "Please continue to jam them open and allow other people to come in and make room for each other because that's the only way that shit will be done."
Some of the women in that room? The Euphoria actress's very own co-stars: Hunter Schafer, who presented her with the award, Sydney Sweeney, and Storm Reid. In her Women in Hollywood interview for ELLE, Zendaya described just how the HBO drama changed her life, saying, "I think Euphoria taught me a lot about myself. It made me more confident in my own abilities, because I doubted myself a lot. I was looking for something to prove I can do it."
Read Zendaya's full acceptance speech, below.
"Thank you so much to ELLE, thank you to Nina, thank you to everyone here in this room. I'm so honored to be here and to be just involved in a part of the conversation and a part of this room. I'm really nervous because this is not an easy room to speak in front of. All right. Get my shit together.
I wanted to start by thanking the women that are at my table. That'd be my mother and my niece and my baby sister for—I'm about to cry right now. Because all three of you have been a tremendous part of developing me as a human, as a woman, leading with example. And I just want to thank you for always nurturing my dreams, and never, never telling me that there was anything that I couldn't do. You always said that I can do it, and I've never been told 'no' by you, and you've always nurtured my dream and told me that I will and can do it. I would be not at all, anywhere, where I am, without all of you exactly by my side, and continues to lifting me up, and allowing me to believe in myself, first and foremost. So thank you.
Thank you, to just everyone in this room, continuing to be fearless with your art, continuing to make space for each other, continue to motivate each other. It's magical to be in a space where you feel appreciated and you feel a bond and a pride within each other, and I feel like that's so special, rarely are you in rooms where you can look across and be, 'Hey, you killed that, and I'm so proud of you!' And I'm so proud of you. I want to see you succeed, and I want to work with you. Let's do something together, and let's build together, and let's create a project together. That's what these rooms are for because we have to continue to build together and work together to create the change and create the things and the narratives, and projects, and the stories, and tell the stories that need to be told, because often, they aren't told, right? And so we might as well tell them our damn self.
I'm incredibly inspired. I don't know how the hell I'm part of this because it's crazy. I'm 23. I'm still figuring it out. You know, I don't have all the answers or anything, but I can say I'm extremely inspired. Please continue to knock down doors, and please continue to jam them open and allow other people to come in and make room for each other because that's the only way that shit will be done.
So thank you so much for allowing me to be here, to not just take up space, but to make space for people that look like me, women that look like me, women who don't look like me, and I'm so incredibly grateful, and hopefully I'll be able to do that like many, many of you already have. So thank you for having me, thank you so much."
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