The second season of Euphoria was even too much for Spider-Man.
Andrew Garfield gushed over Zendaya's performance on season two of the HBO drama—while expressing legitimate concern for her well-being.
"I think it was episode five. It's one of the most relentless episodes of television I've ever seen," Andrew told Zendaya for Variety's Actors on Actors series. "I'm starting to get to know you better, but to have access to that kind of awfulness and the damage and pain, and to make it so human. I was like, 'Are you OK?' How did you make sure you were OK while you were doing that?"
The episode featured Zendaya's character Rue being confronted by her mother Leslie (Nika King), Jules (Hunter Schafer) and Elliot (Dominic Fike) after finding out she had relapsed. After Leslie attempts to take Rue to rehab, she jumps out of the car and escapes, and Rue later begins to feel the effects of withdrawal while on her own.
After another attempted intervention, Rue is caught burglarizing a house and manages to evade police, eventually finding her way back home.
Andrew praised Zendaya's performance, calling it "one of the most remarkable things I've seen an actor do in recent memory."
Andrew, who, of course, appeared in Spider-Man: No Way Home alongside Zendaya and her boyfriend Tom Holland, questioned how the actress was able to make her performance feel so authentic and raw. Her answer?
"Rue has become an amalgamation of my experiences, [Euphoria creator Sam Levinson's] experiences and our collective pain—and seeing through the eyes of an addict," Zendaya explained. "I think the approach was to try it as human as possible without ever shying away from the devastation and the ugliness of what that can create. "
It turns out the scenes in question had been lingering ominously in Zendaya's brain for a long time.
"I had actually been very afraid to shoot that episode," she revealed. "It had been written for a while before the pandemic, and I was dreading having to do it."
It's safe to say she nailed it.