Is she or isn’t she?
There’s a reason Zendaya hasn’t confirmed whether she and Tom Holland are actually married yet. Because she has a wedding movie to promote.
The actress deftly manipulated the media by teasing fans with coy interviews and her bridal white wardrobe, even wearing a wedding dress on the red carpet for premieres and appearances related to “The Drama.” In the film, which opens April 3, Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play an engaged couple whose relationship suddenly takes a turn one week before their wedding.
Is it a coincidence that Law Roach, Zendaya’s outspoken stylist and wardrobe coordinator, was the first to tell the press that Zendaya and Holland’s wedding had already taken place?
“Before every movie, we sit down and brainstorm and talk about what we’re going to do. With her movies, we’ve always done method dressing since ‘The Greatest Showman,'” Roach told Page Six this week. It’s a nod to the tennis-inspired outfit she wore while promoting 2024’s Challengers and the sci-fi futuristic dressing in Dune.
After the 2026 SAG Actor Awards ceremony, Roach was asked about Zendaya and Holland’s engagement on Access Hollywood, and he sparked a publicity storm by saying, “The wedding already happened. You missed it.”
Since then, we’ve seen Holland’s mother hint that he might be joking (Claire Stormer cryptically wrote “lol” when reposting Roach’s Access interview), Roach doubling down (she said “I said what I said” on Extra at the Oscars), and Zendaya herself playing coy.
The 29-year-old actress was asked by host Marsai Martin to “make a little nod or signal” if she wanted to give her a wedding gift, and she flashed her hands to reveal the rings on both of her ring fingers.
During “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” In an appearance on March 16, she revealed that she was upset that “a lot of people” around her weren’t invited to the wedding after an AI-generated photo online showed her and Holland getting married.
Although Holland wasn’t seen with Zendaya at the March 15 Oscars ceremony, where she and Pattinson presented the director’s award to Paul Thomas Anderson (One Battle After Another), her giant engagement diamond did have a gold band that looked like a wedding ring.
One celebrity branding expert called all of this a calculated “catfish”.
“They’re going back to the tricks of the[old Hollywood]studio days,” Mark Borkowski said of Zendaya and her team, which includes Roach. “It remains controlled…If you’re really realistic, you know that your moment is temporary. In modern parlance, that’s what we’re all trying to do with advertising: make the algorithm do its magic.”
“What she’s done recently is found a way to get the story into cultural gossip without ever seeming marketing or pushy,” Borkowski told Page Six. “She’s got this new product and she’s been listening to the rumors about Tom Holland, but she’s never made it public.”
In fact, even her stylist admits this teasing is old and new.
“I’m[Zendaya’s]only stylist. I’ve been working with her since she was 14,” Roach told Page Six, adding that the spectacle of style is an important way to capture public attention.
“We’ve always based the look on the emotion of the movie,” he says, admitting that they aren’t the first to do so-called method dressing. “When Margot Robbie did it for ‘Barbie,’ someone gave it that name. We didn’t invent it by any means. (But) we bought it into pop culture and where people expect it from us,” Roach said.
“We had a brainstorming meeting[for ‘The Drama’]… She literally said, ‘Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,'” he added of Zendaya. “Everything else, bridal white is exactly what it says.”
The actress kicked off the press tour with a “borrowed” look, a white dress worn by Whitney Houston in a 1987 photoshoot and worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the opening scene of the 2008 film Sex and the City.
She wore something blue for Kimmel’s appearance, a sheer floral McQueen dress paired with baby blue heels.
And on Tuesday, at the Los Angeles premiere of A24’s The Drama, Zendaya dipped into her past for a look that was “something old,” revisiting the Vivienne Westwood dress she first wore at the 2015 Oscars. In 2017, red carpet correspondent Giuliana Rancic sparked a controversy when she remarked that the actress’ dreadlocks made her “smell like patchouli oil and weed” (a comment Zendaya later called “ignorant”).
“Technically, it was a wedding dress,” Roach said of the off-the-shoulder stunner. “That dress was in my archives.”
Borkowski praised the choice, saying, “That Vivienne Westwood dress! She was wearing an engagement ring and a wedding ring. The idea that she was married was all well and good.”
Representatives for Holland and Zendaya have not confirmed or denied whether the two are legally married.
AFP (via Getty Images)
But Holland appeared on the roof of the Empire State Building on Wednesday, lighting it up red and blue to celebrate the release of the trailer for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” There was no wedding ring.
Borkowski said it’s all playful.
“Tom Holland, his father is a comedian. They know people very well. They’re very smart. They know the price of fame,” the branding expert said.
“A huge amount of personal branding is built on control. Hollywood and the entertainment scene, like the one she (Zendaya) deploys, is very, very, very controlled,” he added.
“What she’s done is she’s setting the tone. It’s the rumors, it’s her wardrobe choices, it’s the digital breadcrumbs that make you want to be a part of that story,” Borkowski added, calling Zendaya’s moment in the marriage rumor spread “episodic.”
“Leaving people to speculate about new projects creates noise and excitement. This is no coincidence. It’s smart choreography,” he said.
And, wisely, Borkowski explained, the public doesn’t necessarily see it as “publicity stunt or publicity stunt.” “Everything she did was to market ‘The Drama’.”
Meanwhile, Roach has left fans in a bit of a pickle, telling Page Six that while we’ve already seen the old, the borrowed, and the Zendaya blue one, “we haven’t seen anything new.”
The film’s New York City premiere is scheduled for April 2nd. Real drama: Will that be the day Zendaya finally shows off her new husband?
