Zendaya Thinks Media Obsession With Kissing Scenes Is ‘Weird’ After Awkward ‘Best Kisser’ Question

The Challengers star has been hit with the question throughout her career, and definitely with this latest project, but no moment perhaps better captured her sentiments about it than her viral reaction last week on Australia’s Channel 7.

Zendaya and her co-stars Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor have been down under doing the promotional thing for the film when newsreader Edwina Bartholomew left her and everyone else cringing by asking “who is the best kisser” of her co-stars.

Zendaya simply said “Hm?” suggesting she hadn’t heard the question, while Faist quickly jumped in to break any possible tension with a joke by replying, “Josh!”

Cut to her appearance with Jake Hamilton on his Jake’s Takes YouTube channel, and the Euphoria star certainly seems to be alluding to that awkward encounter. Hamilton definitely was talking about all the focus on the kissing scenes.

“I feel like for a hundred years actors have been kissing other actors on the screen,” he said to his guest. “It’s literally a part of your job. You play a role that requires kissing, it’s a thing that you have to do.”

“But I feel like when you do it, because I watched interviews from these press tours,” he continued, “when you do it, there’s an abnormal amount of attention.”

Zendaya agreed immediately, calling it “very odd.” Hamilton wondered if it wasn’t brought up jut as an excuse “to get you to talk about kissing.”

“I have no idea. I don’t know if it’s because they want it to be a viral thing, I don’t know,” she replied. “But I have noticed that, with me specifically. I feel like other actors don’t — If you were with somebody else here, you probably wouldn’t be asked that question.”

“But, yeah, it is a part of my job, and it is a completely normal part of the job, I think, despite other people’s perceptions of our job,” Zendaya added, thanking Hamilton for bringing the topic to light because she’s found being questioned about it so much “weird.”

And there have been tremendously awkward questions about the film’s kissing scenes, with O’Connor facing one at the London premiere, where he was asked how “awkward” it is kissing “Spider-Man’s girlfriend.” Zendaya and Tom Holland have been dating for years now.

Just like Zendaya on Channel 7, O’Connor appeared briefly taken aback by the question before responding, “Oh, not awkward at all! She’s great, she’s brilliant, she’s an amazing actor, and yeah, it was lovely to work with her.”

During promotion for their Dune films, both Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet faced questions about those kissing scenes, per TheWrap, with Chalamet again leaning into the fact that it’s just part of the gig. “That was the nature of the job on this one and the nature of the script,” he said at the film’s Paris premiere. “It’s not more complicated than that.”

Zendaya has even had to address kissing scenes all the way back to the beginning of her career as a child actor, admitting in 2021 that she put her foot down and refused to kiss a co-star on Disney Channel’s Shake It Up because it would have been her first-ever kiss.

Now, it seems every moment is being scrutinized both on-screen and off-screen, with speculation running wild after she unfollowed everyone from her Instagram. When asked if they’d broken up in January, Holland told TMZ, “No, absolutely not.”

Sometimes people just do a thing, for personal or professional reasons, and it doesn’t always have to have some deeper meaning. More recently, the couple was spotted enjoying a tennis match together just last month, as covered by People. Seems like everything’s just fine on all fronts.