All grown up!
Zendaya Coleman is not your average Disney kid; in fact, she is a straight-up anomaly considering all the actors who rushed to shed their child star images after appearing on the network.
The actress, 18, experienced her first taste of stardom appearing opposite Bella Thorne on Disney's Shake It Up from 2010 to 2013. Now she is working on yet another Disney show called K.C. Undercover, about a high school student who is also a spy, recruited by her parents.
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"Selena, Miley, Demi — they're all differnt and they all went different ways," she told Yahoo Style. "Everyone has their own version of their career that they want to create and things that they want to do and accomplish. For me, I obviously want to continue to stay in the Disney world and grow at the same time."
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With this new TV opportunity, Coleman also gets to wear the hat of co-producer. She admires Raven-Symone, who, in her opinion, "had the best Disney show that was on air."
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"I look up to her comedically," she said. "I met her, she was a geniunely kind person, and that's what you want to see: someone who has grown up as a young star but still has a heart of gold and is very sweet."
The "Replay" singer also discussed the elephant in the room — the racial controversy surrounding her casting as Aaliyah in the Lifetime movie, a role she later decided to pass up.
"Here's how I put it: The first African-American President of the United States is half-black. So is he not the first black president? Is he just the first half-black president? Do we take that credit away from him? No. Whoever is supposed to play [Aaliyah] — whether they are half-Asian or whatever — it's not about that. It's about doing it with respect and integrity," she explained to the website.
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In an accompanying behind-the-scenes video of her photo shoot, Zendaya talks about how her love for fashion came to be. "When I was growing up I loved playing dress up, and the funny thing is, I was a major tomboy," she said. "Literally all my clothes came from Target's boys department."
