Halle Berry Calls Zendaya Her ‘Little Sweetheart’ and Wants to Work With Her Someday

Halle Berry and Zendaya apparently have one of those quietly lovely Hollywood friendships that has been happening mostly off-camera.

While attending the Create & Cultivate event in Los Angeles on September 20, Halle told PEOPLE that she and Zendaya do actually speak and described her as “the sweetest” and her “little sweetheart.” Berry also said she would love to work with Zendaya one day and even floated the idea of playing her mother in a film.  

“I do speak to her and I have to say she is the sweetest and my little sweetheart and I would love to find something to do with her someday,” the Crime 101 star tells PEOPLE of Zendaya. “I mean, hopefully we will, but I’m just a supporter of her.”

PEOPLE

The timing is especially cute because Zendaya had just paid homage to Halle at the 2026 Emmys with a custom Prada look and pixie cut inspired by Berry’s 2002 Die Another Day premiere style. Halle loved it and publicly praised Zendaya afterward.  

And now I have questions for Hollywood. How has nobody cast these two together yet?

You have Halle Berry, an Oscar winner with decades of action, drama and genre work behind her, and Zendaya, one of the most selective and bankable actresses of her generation. This feels like the sort of pairing that should already have happened.

The obvious pitch would be “Halle plays Zendaya’s mother,” because Hollywood still has a tendency to look at a woman over 40 and immediately start mentally assigning her maternal roles. To be fair, Halle is 60 and Zendaya is 30, so the age gap would make that casting completely believable.

But surely someone can come up with something more interesting than simply placing them in a kitchen and giving them an emotional mother-daughter scene.

Give me Halle as a legendary assassin training Zendaya as her successor. Give me witches. Or hell, give me rival con artists. Give me a glamorous thriller where neither woman is related to the other at all.

Zendaya also seems famously selective about projects, so whatever brings them together would probably need to be genuinely good rather than a stunt pairing. That is exactly why it could work.

The chemistry is already there in the affection. Now someone just needs to write the script.