This Luca Guadagnino-directed, Zendaya-starring film may look like a traditional sports movie on the surface, but it is really more about relationships, desire, and ambition than tennis.
Director Luca Guadagnino has never been one to shy away from the complicated aspects of human interaction. Known for his visually captivating movies featuring emotionally complex characters, he has helmed critically acclaimed films such as I Am Love, Call Me by Your Name, and Bones and All. These movies are sometimes shocking, often beautifully shot, and never afraid to peer into the murkier corners of the human psyche. Starring and co-produced by Zillennial star Zendaya, Challengers is Guadagnino’s most commercially successful movie to date, but it is often — deliberately — as frustrating as it is compelling.
Zendaya plays Tashi Duncan, a professional tennis player-turned-coach. She guides her husband, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and shapes his career. The couple have a young daughter named Lily (AJ Lister). Art faces a career slump due to age and injury, and Tashi enters him in a Challenger event (a low-level tournament on the pro tour) in New Rochelle, New York, hoping that will help him get his mojo back. Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend, is a struggling low-level player who is living out of his car and enters the New Rochelle Challenger as well. The trio share a long, complicated history, with years of tightly lidded tension culminating in a face-off between Art and Patrick on the court.
“What I found in the script [by Justin Kuritzkes] is a very witty, entertaining, and dynamic story that had this great concept of tennis and relationships bouncing within one another and one being a mirror to the other,” Guadagnino tells Little White Lies. The action on the court is as mesmerising as the relationship between the movie’s three main characters. The director describes the movie as “hyperkinetic”, saying he was most interested in “the emotional flow, in the visual flow, in the gaze of the camera, and how it deals with the story”.
Challengers is not a sports movie in the traditional sense — far from it. Tennis might be central to the plot, but the engine that powers the movie is the complicated relationship between its three main characters. “I don’t want people to go into it thinking, ‘Oh man, I have to understand tennis to understand this movie,’” Zendaya tells Variety. “Tennis is just a metaphor for a lot of bigger [things]. It’s a metaphor for power. For co-dependency. They’re using tennis as their device to get these things out of their system.” Challengers takes an athlete’s single-minded pursuit of excellence and maps that onto the messiness of interpersonal relationships.
The transition from child or teen idol to a grown-up Hollywood star is one that many actors have undertaken, to varying degrees of success. Having starred in the Disney Channel TV series Shake It Up in her teens, Zendaya has since built an immensely successful career, scoring lead roles in the HBO series Euphoria and the Spider-Man and Dune franchises. Challengers is something different for Zendaya, who says she’s “been playing 16-year-olds since [she] was 16”. With this movie, she takes a deliberate step into the next stage of her career. “It was nice to play a character that was not a child anymore. It was also interesting playing parts of my life that I haven’t experienced yet: I’ve not gotten married. I’ve not had a child. Those milestones, I don’t necessarily have a direct reference point for. That was different to feel. Ultimately, it felt like the right time for a character like this.”
It is important that Challengers’ stars are convincing tennis players, so director Guadagnino made Zendaya, Faist, and O’Connor undergo a 12-week tennis boot camp. They were trained by Brad Gilbert, a former player who achieved a career-high singles ranking of world No. 4 in 1990. A prolific coach, his clients include Andy Roddick, Andy Murray, and Andre Agassi. Gilbert’s professional experience helped inform the characters in Challengers. “Brad was really insistent that my character, Art, played with a one-handed backhand,” Faist tells AnOther. Gilbert found parallels between the rivalry between Art and Patrick and the real-life rivalry between Agassi and Pete Sampras in the Challengers script. “Andre was more like the wild child, like Josh’s character, and Pete was the more ritualistic, professional, disciplined one. Brad got really interested in that dynamic, so he was like, ‘You’re gonna play with the one-handed backhand.’”
Sports fans are always rooting for one player or team against another, and part of what makes Challengers so interesting is its characters are not easy to root for or against because of their complicated ties to one another. And it’s their intense — and at times toxic — love-hate relationships that non-sports fans will find compellingly watchable. Whether its characters are on or off the court, Challengers is impossible to look away from.
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Tennis player turned coach Tashi has taken her husband, Art, and transformed him into a champion. To jolt him out of his recent losing streak, she makes him play a “Challenger” event.
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