It seems that Hollywood will pick at anything that strays from ‘the norm’ — last Friday, two of its biggest stars faced questions about their height difference.
Zendaya and Tom Holland are making the rounds promoting their latest film, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and repeatedly being asked to address the fact that Zendaya is taller than her male co-star.
On SiriusXM Town Hall channel, a US network that discusses books, entertainment, pop culture, and TV, host Jessica Shaw asked the two actors (who are a real-life couple) about their height difference during their onscreen kiss in Spider-Man: Far From Home.
“In the Far from Home, when MJ and Peter kiss…Zendaya, you’re taller than Tom. It became this thing…”
Tom interjected — “Not that much taller,” he said. “Let’s put this out there. Maybe like an inch or two at best. It’s not like, people say like, ‘How did you guys kiss? It must have been so difficult.'”
Shaw reiterated, saying she believed height differences between women and men where the woman was taller was “misogynistic”, “so screwed up” and “so problematic that we have this assumption.”
“It’s a stupid assumption” Holland agreed.
“This is normal too,” Zendaya added. “My mom is taller than my dad. My mom’s taller than everyone.”
“I remember when we were doing the Spider-Man screen tests…but every girl that we tested for both roles was taller than me,” Holland continued.
“I wonder whether that was a decision [director] Jon [Watts] had made. There was no one that tested that was shorter than I was.”
“To be fair, I am quite short,” he continued.
“So maybe that was a decision Jon Watts made and something he was aware of and wanted to break the stereotype. I think it’s great.”
Zendaya added that the kiss her character, MJ has with Holland’s is a “nice sweet moment between them” and said how unnecessary it is to try to “cheat” the height difference onscreen.
“Often, having to cheat it and pretend like…why not just let it be?” she said.
“Honestly [I] never thought of it as a thing because my parents were always that way, so I didn’t know that people cared.”
Appearing on The Graham Norton Show last week, Zendaya and Holland faced similar questions about their height.
“I heard that your height difference makes those stunts more complicated,” Norton said to Holland.
“There’s a particular stunt where Spider-Man swings us on top of a bridge, and he places me there,” Zendaya explained.
“He’s supposed to gently rest MJ on the bridge and walk away from her. Because of our height difference… we were attached, so I would land before him. My feet obviously hit the ground before he does.”
Holland added, “She would land, and then I would sort of land like this, and then my feet would swing from underneath me, and she would catch me.”
“It’s so nice to be caught for a change,” he laughed.