Emmys Night: Tom Holland Gave Zendaya to the Room
The 78th Emmy Awards had a best dressed list, a best speech list, and — if you were paying attention — a best husband list, and Tom Holland won that one without being nominated for anything.
Emmys Night: Tom Holland Gave Zendaya to the Room
The 78th Emmy Awards had a best dressed list, a best speech list, and — if you were paying attention — a best husband list, and Tom Holland won that one without being nominated for anything. Zendaya arrived at the Emmys in custom Prada, nominated for the third and final season of *Euphoria*, and Tom Holland was simply there, beside her, in the particular way that newlyweds are beside each other when they have nothing to prove and know it. Every sweet moment between them that cameras caught — the lean, the look, the hand — read less like performance and more like two people who have already decided, and are now just living inside the decision.
What the broadcast didn't show was Marcello Hernández doing the thing nobody else thought to do: extending a dinner invitation to both Zendaya and Harrison Ford mid-ceremony, which is either the most charming move of the night or the most calculated one, and either way it worked, because people are still talking about it and nobody remembers the ad breaks.
Taylor Swift appeared — as a cameo, because of course she did — and the room responded the way rooms always respond to Taylor Swift, which is to say entirely and immediately. What nobody expected was the other Swift sighting doing its own quiet rounds: footage emerged of Taylor Swift in a suite at a Kansas City Chiefs game, deep in conversation with Tom Cruise, the kind of image that generates three separate think pieces before noon. Travis Kelce was presumably somewhere on the field. Tom Cruise was presumably not there by accident. Taylor Swift has never done anything by accident in her life, and her game day appearances — which have evolved from girlfriend cameos into their own sartorial institution — are proof that she understood the assignment before anyone else had read the brief.
Jean Smart and Matthew Rhys made Emmy history. Mariska Hargitay recreated Nicole Kidman's AMC ad and the internet briefly lost its composure. Selena Gomez arrived in gilded Louis Vuitton and looked exactly like someone who has stopped caring what you think and started wearing exactly what she wants, which is its own kind of power.
The Emmys always tell you something true about where television thinks it's standing. This year it stood somewhere between the end of an era — *Euphoria* closing out, Zendaya present for all three chapters of it — and the beginning of something nobody has named yet. Tom Holland held her hand through the commercial breaks. The room will catch up eventually.
