Character Study: Tashi Duncan

Somehow, though, Zendaya's new defining role is a character who's an even bigger mess than that.

In Challengers' two-plus-hour running time, Tashi Duncan cheats on her fiancé with his ex-best friend while wearing said fiancé's dead grandmother's ring. A few years later, she cheats on her now-husband with the same cuckolding ex-best friend in front of a billboard that features her husband's 20-foot-tall visage … moments after spitting in said cuckold's face, but not before cuddling with him in the backseat of the Honda he lives in, where she's also just asked him to throw a match so her husband will keep playing tennis—even though he's a tired and broken shell of himself. Even in Chanel espadrilles and a $2 million bob, there is mounting suspicion that Tashi Duncan ain't shit.

But I have to disagree. There's a popular saying often attributed to Oscar Wilde, but best sung by Janelle Monáe, that touts: Everything is about sex except for sex, which is about power. But Oscar Wilde never met Tashi Duncan, nor the chaotic minds who brought her to life: director Luca Guadagnino, screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, and Zendaya herself. They might tell you that everything is sex except for sex—which is tennis. If Tashi Duncan ain't shit, it's only because her blind ambition on the court had her dropping the ball for over a decade on seeing a love triangle where all sides touch for what it really is: a potentially thriving throuple.

When we meet Tashi in the present day, it's clear that she's achieved success and power, but it's not the success and power she truly wanted—the success and power she was robbed of years before. In the stands of the Phil's Tire Town Challenger in New Rochelle, New York, Tashi Duncan is the embodiment of elite tennis: Cartier watch, tailor-made shirt dress starched by someone else's hands, Aston Martin partnership inked …

She's clearly advanced economically in the world, thanks to her brains and her husband Art's body (and maybe sometimes his ex-best friend Patrick's body when, y'know, they're in Atlanta). But wealth and status and a long-lasting relationship with a child who likes Spider-Verse have not contented Tashi like they have her husband. In Big Little Lies, Meryl Streep's character—who also sported an iconic bob—tells Reese Witherspoon's character that she's a want-er. "There are people in life who content themselves with what they have, and there are others who just … want." Tashi Duncan wants to win, she wants power, she wants to play good fucking tennis. Art has only ever really wanted Tashi (and Patrick when they're in the dining hall, or in their motel room, or playing tennis), and having married her he's content. After Art confesses to his wife and coach that he wants to retire at the end of the season, she later finds him fast asleep in the bed with their young daughter. It's a glimpse into his future without tennis: a rich, handsome, doting father. Sounds pretty good.

But where do we find Tashi after Art's rare moment of straightforward communication? Oh, that would be on a secret rendezvous with his longtime psychosexual frenemy, begging him to let Art win their Challenger match in a last-ditch effort to inspire enough (false!) confidence to keep Art from retiring. And when begging doesn't work, she fights, coerces, slaps, and finally fucks Patrick in the middle of a literal trash storm in a New Rochelle parking lot …

So, yeah. Maybe Tashi's unquenchable thirst to succeed makes her trash a lot of the time. But she keeps her ambition blind for a good reason. After all, what is Tashi's ruthless quest for power and achievement if not a decades-long exercise in avoiding the truth: Her life has been a tragedy, and she's afraid she'll never overcome it.

At 18, Tashi Duncan was a tennis prodigy with an Adidas deal and an endlessly promising future; by 20, she'd suffered a career-ending injury on the Stanford tennis team, an unnecessary detour she took to develop skills beyond just "hitting a ball with a racket," only to learn that hitting a ball with a racket was the only skill she really needed or wanted. With her dream crushed, Tashi falls out with Patrick, whose tenacity and talent she respects, but whose lack of motivation keeps her from emotionally connecting with him. She falls in love with and begins coaching Art into a successful tennis career, but never accepts that his ambition and raw talent can't equal hers. In lieu of grieving the future she lost, she begins living half a life—haunting a space that once belonged to her. Is Tashi terrorizing her two little white boys in a quest to achieve something that only her two own healthy knees could have ever achieved? Yeah. Maybe. Was telling Patrick he had "a better shot with a handgun in his mouth" than winning a Grand Slam at 31 an OK thing to tell someone? Probably not. Was it kind to confirm Art's greatest fear that she'd leave him if he didn't beat Patrick in a tone that made it really hard to tell if she was serious? Definitely!

But here's the thing.

Those two little white boys? They like her telling them what to do, and they always have. They love her whipping them into a confused frenzy, and her loss of tennis doesn't change that for them, only for her. From the moment Patrick and Art meet Tashi, they worship her like a god. When Art finally admits to Tashi that he just hopes she'll love him even after he's done playing tennis, she sarcastically asks him, "What am I, Jesus?" To which, Art replies, "Yeah." To Art, Tashi's love is paramount; to Patrick, it's a carrot, forever dangled in front of him. But deep down, they know: Jesus Christ died for humanity's sins, and Tashi Duncan would kill for hers. Tashi's injury was the ultimate betrayal of the universe and of self. And yes, obviously talk therapy would have been a better way to deal with the fear and grief that came with that kind of loss—but, in this twisted triangle, using the irresistible draw between two former best friends who both also happen to be professional tennis players sort of works, too.

The look that comes over teenage Tashi's face as she watches Art and Patrick kissing above her in a dirty motel room—on Zendaya's inordinately expressive face—could be that of an all-powerful god. It could be that of a monster. But Tashi Duncan isn't a villain any more than the other two corners of this triangle are. She's simply a tragedy trying to game her way into a triumph. And by god, she kind of does it. With sex, power, and tennis, just like she hoped she would at 18.

When Art and Patrick first make their way into Tashi's orbit, she tells them that tennis isn't an expression of self, it's a relationship. After all, you need an opponent to play tennis. And to play good fucking tennis, like we see in the Challenger final, you need whatever the hell Tashi Duncan has been up to with her two little white boys. Tashi would kill to be whole again, Art would kill to give her his place, and Patrick would kill to be accepted by them once more. It works in perfect, toxic harmony because they all need one another to propel themselves forward—and, in the unexpectedly joyous end, they all want each other too.

"For about 15 seconds there, it was like we were in love," Tashi once told the boys of her Junior U.S. Open final opponent (the same one who eventually became the no. 1 women's player in Tashi's absence on the professional circuit). In the present day, with the final Rosebud-racket-reveal that Patrick has had sex with Tashi again, Art is finally inspired to play like he wants to win again. As their volley builds into a fervor almost foreign to tennis, the distance closes between all of them, until Art crashes over the net into Patrick's arms, both of their faces broken apart in joyful grins. Tashi lets out an unbridled scream of ecstasy—the kind she hasn't screamed since she last played. The kind that only a moment of natural synchronicity deserves. Three forsaken vessels, finally made perfect as one.

In that final moment, Art and Patrick have finally found their way back to one another—back to tennis—with Tashi as their guide. And there's a hint of it there: Tashi's chance not just at winning, not just at power, not just at tennis—but at contentment.