“I was basically like, ‘I want to do this,’ and my dad quit his job as a teacher to make it happen,” Zendaya shared in 2017. “My mom stayed in Oakland because she had two jobs: teaching and working at the California Shakespeare Theater at night. Those two jobs paid for all of our car trips back and forth for the year I was auditioning. Luckily, I had parents who were like, ‘You know what? We believe in you.’ I got my first job on the Disney Channel when I was 13, and it was just me and my dad in an apartment in downtown LA.”
Looking back on her upbringing in 2016, Zendaya told Ellen DeGeneres, “I gotta give it to my parents. I’m really lucky to have the parents that I have. They just have always instilled in me those core values that I think I have to carry with me through everything. I give it up to them, I give it up to my family.”