In The Drama, Zendaya’s Emma Is — For Better & For Worse — Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen

Major The Drama spoilers ahead. Romantic comedies are often overwhelmingly concerned with beginnings. How — and if — a couple gets together is the whole thing. From the meet-cute to inevitable happily ever after (which is always implied, rarely shown), rom-coms ask us to value the start of a love story. It’s understandable since couples cling to the flirtatious fruitions of their union in real life, revisiting their lore as proof of their love in the depths of the hard shit. And despite what romance movies lead you to believe, shit always gets hard. Looking back at the first meeting, when you both thought the absolute best of each other, is a necessary relationship survival tactic and proof of the sturdiness of your foundation.

In The Drama, when Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) meet, it’s based on a lie. And later, when shit gets hard right before their wedding, it’s because of the truth. The Drama asks some big questions that, at their core, aren’t very romantic or funny: what happens when your partner isn’t who you thought they were? Can you still love someone when perception gives way to reality? And if attraction is conditional, and forgiveness is finite, is it really love? And, ultimately: what would you do if your fiancé revealed they “almost did a mass shooting”? 

The latter is the crux of The Drama’s plot and the root of its controversy. It’s also why Zendaya’s Emma is one of the most fascinating and unprecedented characters – specifically, Black woman character — we’ve ever seen onscreen. At times, this makes the viewing experience even more entertaining and exhilarating and at others, it generates a level of disbelief that is almost too hard to suspend. Using mass shootings as a funny plot device in a romantic comedy (debatable if this movie qualities as one; I’d call it a dark comedy) is fucked up, unequivocally, but the twisted nature of this reveal is the point. And I would argue that Emma’s race (she’s biracial with a Black dad and white mom) does inform the role. Some critiques of the film have pointed out that Emma’s race isn’t central enough to this story. “This is some white people shit. Just, all the way around, this is white nonsense,” Brooke Obie writes in her review for Black Girl Watching. 

“Whether he noticed or even cared, it’s obvious that [director Kristoffer Borgli] a Norwegian white man was not up to the task of tackling the impact of the racial imagery he was creating in the production of this film… Black girls don’t do school shootings. It’s not a thing. Anywhere!”

This is true. School shooters in the United States are overwhelmingly, almost exclusively, white and male. And the reasons for this are rooted in very serious sociopolitical, patriarchal, and culturally specific issues — ones that I understand may seem like they are being dismissed with this storyline. But the fact of this plot is that Emma didn’t actually do it. It’s also true that Borgli initially wrote Emma as white in his script but as soon as Zendaya was cast, the character and the entire movie changed. For better mostly, and also, considering the discourse, for worse. But I don’t think Zendaya or anyone involved in making this film is naive to the implications that came with her casting. The idea that a biracial Gen Z girl disconnected from her Blackness in a predominantly white town in America grows up being bullied to the point that she becomes radicalized by the internet and unsavory “aesthetics” to try to belong isn’t far-fetched to me. The reality of the United States’ gun violence and mass shooting crisis and subsequent refusal to enact legislation to stop these tragedies isn’t inherently funny at all, but it is absurd. And it deserves to be ruthlessly ridiculed and used as fair game for satire. Isn’t that better than pretending the issue doesn’t exist at all? That might sound insensitive coming from a Norwegian director (who has his own inexcusably sketchy past) and me, a Canadian, but the film does treat Emma’s reveal seriously. 

After Charlie, Emma and their two best friends, Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) meet up for a final wine and food tasting days before the wedding, they decide, at the urging of Rachel, to share the worst things they have ever done. Charlie says he cyberbullied a kid so badly he had to move (bad!). Mike says he used a date as a human shield against a dog attack once (not great!). And Rachel reveals that she intentionally left a “slow” child locked in a trailer closet in the woods and that he was only found because of a search party, not her own admission (horrific!). Each of these people — a white man, a Black man, and a white woman — are afforded grace in their admissions. The confessions are laughed off or chalked up to childhood mistakes.

But Emma, a Black woman who didn’t even follow through with her heinous act and seems genuinely guilty about it (as she should), is treated like a closet sociopath who may snap at any moment. To me, her race is precisely why she’s met with such vitriol. In a post-2020 world, Black women, especially light-skinned ones who look like Zendaya, have been stereotyped by white liberals as monolithic arbiters of virtue, the people who will “save them” and stand morally heads and shoulders above everyone else. It’s clear that Charlie projected a lot onto Emma when they met. He says as much in the vows he struggles to write throughout the movie. 

When it’s revealed that Emma “almost did a mass shooting” and her disability (she’s deaf in one ear) that Charlie once saw as a cute quirk is actually the result of shooting practice, she shatters the perfect image Charlie had of her. And Rachel, the Karen stand-in that could also be interpreted as a representative of the performative social media masses who cast judgment without empathy or self reflection, has finally been given an excuse to turn her jealousy of Emma into righteous indignation. Later, when Rachel says Mike “grew up around guns” which he emphatically denies, she’s showing her bias of Black people.

Haim’s delivery of each line is equal parts infuriating and hysterical. On the surface, she’s the film’s moral compass, reminding the audience of the severity of mass shootings (which we see the effect of when Rachel’s cousin shows up; she’s using a wheelchair because of injuries sustained from a school shooting) but given the carelessness and lack of remorse with which she shared her own confession, this woman isn’t all that virtuous or a good person. Frankly, she sucks.  

Rachel’s reaction has a chain effect. Her husband Mike feigns being equally appalled. And because of their shock and awe, Charlie spirals. Maybe his sweet, beautiful, younger, disabled, “palatably” Black fiancé is actually the violent monster the world (and his own biases) claim she is. Someone on threads put it poignantly like this: “The most dangerous place to be Black is white people’s imagination.” 

Here’s film critic Jourdain Searles’ interpretation of The Drama: “Charlie thought Emma was harmless, but now he’s afraid of her and can’t shake the feeling that the woman he loves is a Mad Black Woman,” she writes. “And despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s this fear that drives the film. Racism, not Emma, is the real villain of The Drama.” I don’t think it’s hard to draw a direct line from the film’s ambitious and provocative premise to its racial undertones, but I also think we may be giving too much credit to Borgli if we assume every moment of racial satire was done on purpose, especially knowing that intent was not there in the initial script. 

Emma’s motivations are flimsy at best. The lack of depth works for the comedic elements of the film — Charlie is twisting and contorting himself to try to justify his soon-to-be-wife’s almost action, but she refuses to give him a clear moral reason for why she didn’t go through with it. Emma didn’t shoot up her school because someone else did a mass shooting the same day. That’s it. From Charlie’s perspective, this is sociopathic. From Emma’s POV (which we rarely get to see), it’s why she’s convinced people are talking behind her back and she’s unworthy of love or why she doesn’t have any friends of her own. The film could have used another scene or two that gave us more of Emma’s interior, or even a commiseration scene between her and Mike (except I think each of these characters are the way they are because they have yet to confront their inner self-loathing and anti-Blackness). So I understand Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastien’s critique that Emma “isn’t legible.” Bastien continues: “Emma confesses to Rachel that Charlie is her first crush and love, and that is where the exploration of a character without friends ends.” 

I don’t agree entirely, because I think this confession tells us a lot about Emma. How often do we see an anxious Black woman onscreen who did something so bad, she isolated herself from everyone? Friendship is integral to a lot of Black women, but lonely Black folks exist. And even if they didn’t, it’s fun to get to see a character onscreen I truly have never seen before, played by a biracial Black woman. Emma is someone who threw herself into an interracial relationship with an older man and did not care that he bamboozled her into a first date by pretending to have read the book she was lost in when he first spotted her. She diffuses arguments by pantsing him. Emma draws the line at her DJ doing heroin (allegedly), but shrugs off Charlie’s infidelity. She’s confusing and utterly captivating, thanks in large part to Zendaya’s careful performance. I would have watched another hour of Zendaya’s Emma trying to figure out her feelings and Pattinson’s Charlie fucking up as his feelings eclipsed hers (as a leading man, Pattinson is engaging but as a character, Charlie is trash). Together, they are eccentric and electric. My biggest beef with The Drama is that Zendaya and Pattinson’s palpable chemistry, at times, feels wasted on a comedy with very little romance. As a twisted dark comedy about forgiveness, the price of radical honesty, and the limits of unconditional love, The Drama works. As a romance, it leaves a lot to be desired.

“Unfortunately, it’s hard to be invested in whether Emma and Charlie stay together... Beyond good sex, why does Charlie want to stay with Emma? What does marriage mean to them?” Bastien writes for Vulture. “In refusing to integrate and interrogate the social, racial, and interpersonal contexts of these characters, Borgli occludes the possibility of true romance blooming. The cowardice of this approach renders the film a frustrating experience.”

Bastien isn’t wrong. And the lack of romance is why the film, in my eyes, isn’t a true romantic comedy. But I care less about the movie’s shortcomings (of which there are many!) or its strengths (of which there are many!) and more about what this character and role say about the kind of actor Zendaya has chosen to be. With Challengers, Zendaya opted to play a villainous cheater whose ambition was her most redeeming quality (and still, I’m a Tashi Duncan apologist). In The Drama, she takes that complexity — and our perception of who Black women can be onscreen — to another level. Zendaya has spoken before about being conscious of her privilege and the colorism that continues to persevere in Hollywood. I think she knows that audiences would have a very different reaction to a dark skinned Black woman character who admits the secret in The Drama. She’s testing her own limits as an actor and she’s challenging audiences to move beyond meet-cutes and perceptions to interrogate humanity and who gets to be complicated onscreen. 

“I don't want every character I play to be likeable all the time or perfect,” Zendaya said in an interview with Refinery29 in 2024. I think that it's so important for me to be able to depict different types of characters and have the freedom to do so."

I say let Zendaya play her weird, difficult, villainous little freaks. There’s room for fair and valid critiques of those choices, of course, and I implore you to read the great criticism that has stemmed from this film, but that doesn’t mean Zendaya shouldn’t have taken the role or that a Black woman shouldn’t have played it. The discourse has been enthralling. And the interpretations Black viewers have gleaned from the film — Borgli's intention or not — are because that is how each of us view the world.

Of course, there are going to be Black women upset that Emma isn’t fully fleshed out enough. She's not. But there are also going to be people who don’t think her race needed to be spelled out to us. And that those flashbacks (starring a stellar Jordyn Curet) were enough to tell us exactly who Emma was. Also, what exactly does it mean that "race isn't a factor" when it clearly is just by virtue of the character's race. Are we hoping for on-the-nose monologues spelling out the nuances of being Black in America, written by a white director? And then, there are those of us who just appreciate dissecting an entertaining, dark A24 comedy starring a Black woman. All the reviews I quoted in this piece are by Black women. They are all exceptional reads. Most of them contradict each other. We can disagree. That’s OK. I don’t think we can constantly remind people of our individuality, demand various types of representation, and plead for complex Black characters, then balk when we are confronted with one. 

The entire discourse surrounding The Drama has reminded me of a conversation I had with director Nia DaCosta (a Black woman I hope Zendaya gets to work with soon). “What does freedom look like?” DaCosta told me when I interviewed her last year for Hedda, a film featuring another Black female character unlike I’d ever seen: Hedda is a self-destructive, chaos-causing menace. “Especially when it comes to how we represent ourselves, how we represent ourselves as Black women, is it freedom to limit ourselves to just these stereotypically positive traits, like being elegant or strong or noble? Is that freedom?” DaCosta asked. It's not. And by that logic, Zendaya is chasing freedom. I'm not sure she's found it yet, but her quest has been thrilling to follow.

“I understand historically that we have to make sure that we're not going to invite literal violence, by showing a negative portrayal of Blackness. I'm really empathetic to that attempt, but I also think it does limit us," DaCosta continued. "For me, what's been so important is seeing dynamic, human, Black women on screen in my life. I think that's really what builds empathy, not making a small box for ourselves that we have to fit into. It was really exciting for me, but I also knew that people might get a little upset.”

I think Zendaya knew the same when she took on this role. The Drama aims to provoke. And so does Zendaya. Based on her choices, it’s only the beginning. And I can’t wait to see what she does next.