Portrayed by: Zendaya
Film: Challengers
In more ways than one, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is a character study. It demands that we pay attention to all three of the main characters individually, then as an incredible trio who can’t help but consistently orbit around one another. They’re each profoundly flawed, complex individuals who make mistakes because they’re trying to find some sort of meaning in life.
Through Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, the character is a representation of how the death of one’s career breaks everything inside of them. She’s also a character for whom freedom and independence matter tremendously. She’s a caretaker in every way where it counts, and she’s someone who understands people better than they know themselves. People often come out of the theater immediately wanting to vilify her, but with that, we strip her agency, and we don’t acknowledge how much love she gives even when every piece of her simply aches to play tennis.
Tashi Duncan Knows How to Love
The few glimpses we see of Tashi while she’s on top of the world are by virtue of the love that surrounds her. Though her dad is elsewhere in the present day, we know they’re on good terms still because of the small moment where her mom mentions FaceTiming him. We also know that though her parents may have been strict when she was younger, they didn’t seem too overbearing. While the more specific answers ultimately lie in the heads of the creators, everything we see shows us that Tashi doesn’t lack love when she’s young. To a degree, even though she might not have total agency before going off to college, she isn’t caged either. There are parties to celebrate her, crowds adoring over her, campaigns, ads, etc. She’s doing the thing she loves most, and she’s doing it surrounded by people who support her.
When she first meets Art Donaldson and Patrick Zweig, it’s clear that she sees something in both of them. Fire and ice. They immediately call to her. While she sits on the rock, emblematically representing a siren luring them toward their demise, they do the same for her, lounging with their cigarettes and probing questions. She’s equally entranced by both how Patrick sees her as more of a peer and how Art admires her like a goddess. The longing is palpable, and the game becomes as riveting to her as tennis.
Tashi is also wise enough to read people. She sees what others don’t. While we don’t see enough of her playing tennis, we can tell that she’s great at it because she can read her opponent’s next move. She understands the relationship within the game. With this, we realize that even though she’s asking questions and trying to get the truth out of Art and Patrick in the hotel room, she already knows. She sees that there’s something there long before they do. So she tests the waters, throws the ball into their court, and she starts a new game. It’s also why she doesn’t choose one of them, but instead, she makes it a play.
She understands that tennis is a relationship, but more than that, she understands what it means to love something with every fiber of her being. Art and Patrick both love tennis, but they don’t love it the way she does. They don’t see it as a part of themselves. When Tashi Duncan loves, she does so with everything in her, even while she puts up a front. She has a different way of showing it. Perhaps the way she was nurtured was to push—though her mom seems easygoing, maybe things were different when she was younger. Maybe all she knows is how to bring out the fire—the rage and the uncertainties to allow them to clash in a way that authorizes love to do all the talking. With both Art and Patrick, she often brings up the other; she counters what they say with what they’re really thinking, and she sees right through both of them. There’s no denying the fact that even though they start by playing for her number, she wins, too, because they both give her the fire and ice necessary to balance out the love inside of her. And there’s no denying the fact that there’s a softness in her as well.
To Lose Everything and Die Inside
The outcome might sound dramatic to some, but when Tashi Duncan’s knee betrays her, an enormous part of her dies. Zendaya is masterful throughout the film, but no moment shows us her strengths as an actress, such as when she sits against a tree and grapples with the fact that this is the end of her career. She shows viewers everything we need to understand that the character will never be the same again.
Tennis fuels Tashi, and when she loses it, every bit of joy inside her breaks apart and hides away in a locked corridor. We know she loves the game with every bone in her body, but we see her strength (and weakness) in the choice to move forward because anyone else would’ve been much worse. The weakness comes from her inability to love as fiercely still because every part of her is broken now.
That said, how do people vilify someone who loses the one thing they firmly believe gives them a purpose? The one thing that keeps them going. We can’t because any one of us in her shoes would’ve been just as destroyed. If you’re lucky enough to love what you do, nothing is worse than not being able to do it anymore. To have it taken from you instead of it being your choice. As tired and broken as Art is, he knows he’s the lucky one. He does. We all do. It’s normal to be frustrated with what we love most, but losing it entirely is a whole other battle. It’s an endless warfare a person never wins. It’s a constant, profoundly exhausting fight with phantom aches that persist in tormenting.
I, for one, can’t ever blame Tashi for the ropes she pulls and the decisions she makes to finally get the one thing she wants most: to watch some good f—king tennis. When the games don’t fuel her, the world around her becomes duller. In many ways, it’s like how every time I go to a theater, I want to watch a movie like Challengers even when I know that’s not possible. I want something that’ll be a five-star—I want it to make me feel every emotion possible. But that’s not how anything in the world works, no matter how much we want it to. So, for Tashi, it’s always about the desire to feel the high of playing, and for the two people she loves most, giving that to her is no small thing. The best part is she lights the match for a burning candle by going to Patrick, but the fuse turns into a dynamite instead. It’s not about Art winning; it’s about the one thing she never thought she’d get in the end—the two of them reconnecting, which makes the entire movie far more complex and reflective of humanity.
Tashi Duncan loses everything when tennis betrays her, but she gains love back by the end of Challengers. She finds the true spark again. Maybe, and I believe that a part of her will always love tennis more than she’ll love Art and Patrick, but when she screams “Come on” the second time, it’s the dawn of her life again. Life doesn’t end or begin in our 20s. Sometimes, the 30s win. After all that pain and suffering, she finally gets a win. She feels every emotion under the sun, the high, the longing, the joy, and the satisfaction.
Tashi Duncan’s Role in the Trio
It bears repeating what I wrote when discussing Tashi’s agency in our feature: There Are No Teams – It’s a Three Way Love Story With Agency at the Center
When people vilify Tashi, they refuse to recognize how much she takes care of others. Is she profoundly scarred and broken because she can’t play tennis anymore? Absolutely. Is she living vicariously through Art and in some twisted way, through Patrick? Without question. Does her dream die again with Art’s decision to retire? 100%. Yet, of all the characters, Tashi has the most agency. She’s fully aware of it, even if, in hindsight, it seems like she doesn’t. Deep down, she knows tennis is her one true love, and she isn’t bound to Art or Patrick against her will. She knows exactly what she’s doing when she tells Art she’ll leave him if he doesn’t win the game. She knows that it’ll destroy him and simultaneously fuel him.
She also knows exactly what she’s doing when she goes to Patrick, asking for him to let Art win. If she hated one more than the other, why on earth would she do that? Yes, she knows that Art is a better player than Patrick and there’s a good chance he could actually win, so if she wanted to leave him, why bother saying something like that? She could simply walk away. She has that choice. Art isn’t an abusive husband who’d threaten her life if she ever truly wanted a divorce. He’d give it to her because he’d give her anything—that much is clear. Does she resent Art to a degree? Absolutely. She also resents Patrick. They each feel this way at one point, which is largely where their intimacy boils and unfurls. To a degree, they also resent themselves. (Someone send them to therapy, please.)
Tashi isn’t trapped. She chooses to kiss Art in the parking lot, she chooses to marry him, she chooses to have a kid with him, and then she chooses to sleep with Patrick, too. And, most importantly, she’s entitled to these choices, which is why she fights back when Patrick accuses her of hating Art because it takes away her part in the decisions she’s made after life took away the one thing she loved most. The only thing Tashi didn’t have control over was her accident. Everything that came after was a direct result of the choices she made.
Challengers makes it unmistakable that even while Tashi Duncan is hesitant to be vulnerable, she won’t do anything if she doesn’t want to.
Thus, at the end of the day, Tashi needs Art as much as he needs her. Coaching him and building a foundation together is the second best thing to being a professional tennis player. However, Tashi also needs Patrick. She needs his grit and his confidence. She needs his fire. She says it to them when she first meets them: You’re fire and ice. They go together. One cannot exist without the other because otherwise destruction and pain will follow.
Tashi Duncan is their rock. She’s the heart of the film. She is the caretaker. She’s the levelheaded one. She’s the one born to be a mother, too, because she knows how to love. To believe that she doesn’t adore her daughter or that she’s not a good mother completely dismisses all of the characterization we see, which is that Tashi will always put others first. She has agency, and she makes choices for herself, but she also chooses selfless paths. She doesn’t need permission. She’s curious. She’s smart. She’s a hard worker. She needs Art and Patrick as much as they need her, but without her, their drives simmer. There’s too much pain to overcome. Again, she is the center of everything, and it’s a good thing they both love her tremendously because she needs it, too.
There’s also this idea that she uses both of them to fuel herself, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that when it’s a) consensual and b) deeply human to want satisfaction.
To repeat—in all three deep dives.
Patrick is fully open about his sexuality. We have confirmation that he’s bisexual because of the split second with the Tinder matches showing both men and women. Art represses his sexuality like his life depends on it because, once more, Art needs people to guide him. There are thousands of ways the threesome scene could’ve gone if Tashi didn’t stop them from kissing. Still, what Art doesn’t realize (even while he thinks he’s too old) is that his need not to feel left out is linked to his desires for both of them. Thus, when he screams in the end, it almost parallels the scream he heard from Tashi the first time he watched her play. He’d never seen anything like it, and he had never experienced anything similar, either. This time, it’s almost like it finally clicks. It’s freeing.
It’s at that moment where Art (maybe, hopefully) understands that this is all possible. After all that frustration is out of him and he continues playing, he and Patrick enter back into a relationship. It turns into a sort of love-making that’s even rarer than anything Tashi hoped she’d see. But this relationship does not end after a winner is crowned. It’s something that’s going to continue off the court, too. Patrick and Art can’t spend two seconds together without giggling and pushing each other’s buttons. They’re finally back in that place, and it feels right again.
When Tashi screams at the end with her glowing smile on full display, it’s because she finally gets what she wants, which is some good fu%$ing tennis. And the best part of it is that she gets it from her husband and their soulmate. It’s jarring how people could come out of this movie and choose sides when the invisible string threading them together isn’t all that hidden. It’s bold. It’s obvious. Tashi needs Art’s tenderness, but she also needs Patrick’s gravitas, too. Patrick needs Art’s playfulness, but he also needs Tashi’s fire. And Art needs every part of them with every bone in his body.
Tashi Duncan isn’t a villain. She most certainly isn’t a saint, either. She’s a complex, brilliant woman who knows what she wants and understands the importance of loving something with everything in you. She knows what people need, how they need it, and when they need it. In the words of Miss Swift, a “Mastermind,” perhaps. [They’re all “Mastermind” coded at some point throughout the film.] But beyond the jokes, surely millions of women see themselves in her struggle, and Zendaya’s portrayal is a superb (and unsurprising) accomplishment that brings to life some of the most complicated emotions to convey on screen.
The fact that her face is the film’s final shot proves that she’s the undeniable heart of everything. Her unparalleled, incomparable joy closes out the film, and if that’s not an indication of the remarkable character journey we go on through her, then I don’t know what is. Tashi Duncan deserves the world, and I sure hope she gets it.
First Featured Image Credit: © 2024 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc