Why is Zendaya a mononymic star? It was an early bet on her potential for leading-lady singularity. Interviewed at twenty, on the cusp of graduating from sitcom-teen workhorse to the love interest in “Spider-Man,” Zendaya explained, in her gracefully blasé way, that she “just thought it was cool, like Cher or Prince.” She will turn thirty in September. With four film projects landing this year, from a salty indie to a summer blockbuster, along with the latest season of “Euphoria,” her ascent to rarified fame seems uncontested. But what about who she is—her interiority—as a grown-up performer? Zendaya and her film audience still seem to be figuring that out.

She isn’t burdened by the need to shed a darker, more mercenary child-star past. From the outset, the right decisions were made. She began as a Disney fixture: first, as one of the leads in “Shake It Up,” a buddy comedy about two background dancers, and, later, in “K.C. Undercover,” a secret-life sitcom in which the titular K.C., her parents, and her two younger siblings double as government spies, and which managed to credibly link itself to the tradition of nineteen-nineties Black sitcoms. Kadeem Hardison—known for playing Dwayne Wayne on “A Different World”—took the role of her father. (We will see him again in Season 3 of “Euphoria.”) The nuclear family was Black, apparently at the insistence of the show’s young star. Zendaya had about her the air of a Raven-Symoné, the type of savvy young Black performer who could play the genial child entertainer onscreen but, when the cameras cut, did not play about her business.

This hyperawareness of Hollywood’s machinery—and how Black actresses function within the caste system of the industry—has shaped Zendaya’s career since, especially as she’s transitioned into the world of film. Professionalism is the lens through which we can understand her. She is poised and adroit as she submits to the press-tour circuit. She dodges rumor, most recently, about whether she has secretly married her partner and “Spider-Man” co-star, Tom Holland, with a kind of winking tact. Onscreen, there is rarely the sense that she is performing from the full, liberated joy of her power but, rather, that she is working through a complex casting strategy that will yield carefully calibrated wins. Rather than sit back and wait for casting agents to dial, she has proactively shaped her performer’s self into a reproducible version of a Zeitgeist woman—her vocal patterns, her laugh, her scowl, all sculpted to the moment. So, when I watch her, I am often struck by the feeling that her charisma is a cover for a realness that she is withholding, which she has calculated is not prudent to fully expose.

Is her professionalism an obstacle to risk? Fatal to artistry? She speaks matter-of-factly about her relative privilege in the industry. She is not “only” an actress; she is a producer, which dates back to her time on “K.C. Undercover.” As a cultural figure, she strikes me as a code-switcher. She is not the crossover case, who distances herself from Black Hollywood. The prognosticators on the industry podcast “The Town” hand-wring over her box-office pull, but they might not register the meaning of her attending the Essence Black Women in Hollywood Awards, in vintage Caché initially worn by Whitney Houston. Zendaya is biracial—her mother is white German Scottish, her father, African American. She knows she benefits from colorism, being what she has called “Hollywood’s acceptable version of a Black girl.” She is not playing the faux naïf; she deliberately capitalizes on her industry’s trend toward race-blind casting. She was open about her tactics securing her role as M.J., the latest iteration of Mary Jane Watson, in “Spider-Man,” a character that had most recently been played by Kirsten Dunst. The character had been written as white, but Zendaya tried out anyway; her auditioning called the bluff of liberal Hollywood.

Now Zendaya is everywhere, and everything: she is the tennis star puppeteering two lovesick adversaries in “Challengers”; she’s the emperor’s mistress in the “Dune” series; she is the neglected girlfriend of a hotshot director in “Malcolm & Marie.” That film, directed by Sam Levinson—who first worked with Zendaya on “Euphoria,” the series that won her a Golden Globe and an Emmy—is total shlock, but it does provide the id moment in her career. Zendaya’s character, Marie, a depressive addict, who finds herself at complete unease in the Hollywood bestiary, claws at Malcolm, played by John David Washington, who is nothing more than a vessel for Levinson’s entitled auteur grievances. Still, it is the one film in which Zendaya inhabits a Black heterosexual world, because Malcolm is a Black man, even if he’s a double for Levinson, a white filmmaker.

How Zendaya’s film characters are “raced” is almost always an outgrowth of their romantic or sexual worlds, which are almost unilaterally with white men. An extremely fragile veneer of post-racial logic blankets these spiky romances, which take place in conspicuously progressive cities. Tashi Duncan sneering “I’m taking good care of my little white boys,” in “Challengers,” is a perfunctory gesture—really, a tell—in a film that had no use for her psychology elsewhere. Because Zendaya plays young women, these women still have parents, and the actors cast to play her parents—which is to say her history, the expository reasons for her Blackness—typically flit in and out of the background, there to signify and do nothing else. It can often feel as if Zendaya has been added to a preëxisting story, like salt on a finished dish. The ostensible fear is that of identity hardening into a cudgel, foreshortening a character’s emotional palette. But why can’t it expand that palette?

Her latest role, Emma, in Kristoffer Borgli’s wedding-disaster movie “The Drama,” is the one that I keep thinking about. We live in the age of the oppressive publicity campaign. Zendaya did her style-as-cosplay thing, in the weeks leading up to the film’s release, looking modelesque in bridal looks across the globe. In the actual movie, Robert Pattinson’s Charlie, a mussed Englishman, spins out after he learns that Emma, his fiancée and dream girl, once planned to carry out a school shooting when she was a bullied, unhappy teen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Charlie prods Emma incessantly, digging for a reason that could justify her adolescent rage, though he never asks if her sense of isolation stems from being different. Because the film has banished acknowledgment of race from its quarters, the scenes can make you feel insane. The only catharsis is in the actress Jordan Cuyet, who plays the younger version of Emma, whom we see doing target practice in the woods, and basking in the computer glow of incel chatrooms. But even this Emma is largely a figment of Charlie’s imagination; when we see her point a shotgun at a dog, which she ultimately doesn’t shoot, it’s unclear whether the scenario is one that he concocted in his head. For the film to sustain itself as an elongated question about how well you really know your partner, Emma’s interiority has to be put on the pyre; she must be rendered a void. As Rachel, her maid of honor—a woman whom Emma met through Charlie—notes in a nasty reception speech, she doesn’t even have friends. Where are her people? Borgli isolates Emma, stranding her in a mostly white world, because it’s the only way his movie can make conceptual sense.

Borgli is a Norwegian director who, in the wake of his film’s release, has taken heat for having the audacity to bring America’s trauma of school shootings to the casual level of a romantic comedy. I don’t particularly like him as a figure; his director persona is one of entitlement. But I did like “The Drama,” a movie about reality, projections, and the risk of loving another (or should I say, the other?). I couldn’t love it, though, because I didn’t really care what Emma thought about the disintegration of her panicked partner. I cared about what Zendaya thinks. ♦