The Greatest Showman star Zendaya opened up to Marie Claire magazine this week about her career and the struggles around it. The nearly 22-year-old appeared on the front cover of this month's magazine and dished it all.
"What my white peers would be able to get away with at this point in their career is not something that I will be able to do. And I knew that from when I was real young. That's just the truth, and so you'll be kind of afraid of making mistakes because I love what I do. I don't want to jeopardize it at any point because I am not allowed the room to mess up," Zendaya explained to the magazine.
Earlier this year she appeared at New York's Beautycon to discuss race in Hollywood and the issues she deals with. "As a black woman, as a light-skinned black woman, it's important that I'm using my privilege, my platform, to show you how much beauty there is in the African-American community. I am Hollywood's, I guess you could say, acceptable version of a black girl, and that needs to change. We're vastly too beautiful and too interesting for me to be the only representation of that. What I'm saying—it's about creating those opportunities. Sometimes you have to create those paths. And that's with anything: Hollywood, art, whatever."