Zoey TakesHER SHOT

Zoey Deutch's turn as Jean Seberg was a decade in the making. It's helped give her acting life a second wind

Vanities / Spotlight

Joy Press

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, just as Zoey Deutch's film career was beginning to take off, Richard Linklater casually mentioned that he wanted to cast her as Jean Seberg. The director was considering a movie about the making of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's first contribution to the French NewWave crusade to radically reinvent film. Deutch was intrigued. What cinephile doesn't have an image of Seberg, with cropped pixie hair and a New York Herald Tribune T-shirt, seared into their memory?

"I totally fell in love with her," Deutch says of Seberg, whom she went on to play in Linklater's long-incubating Nouvelle Vague, which will be released this fall. "She was very mysterious, which I feel is the opposite of me—I'm the least mysterious person, and I worried about how to tap into that." But Linklater's decision to shoot in black and white in Paris with a French cast and crew gave Deutch a tangible connection to her role: "Seberg was learning French while acting in Breathless and said she felt very insecure. That really helped me, because I was also insecure about my French."

The two women seem to have little else in common. Seberg was plucked out of small-town Iowa as a teenager to star in the film Saint Joan, directed by Otto Preminger, who became her sadistic Svengali. She was burned while shooting the movie's climactic scene and then emotionally scorched when the critics and public tore her fledgling performance to shreds. "No one can handle that kind of energy coming your way," Deutch says, "but when you have no support and no foundation, it's traumatic." After Breathless, Seberg would come to symbolize the young, liberated American woman at the dawn of the '60s.

Deutch grew up in Los Angeles. Her mom is Back to theFuture star Lea Thompson; her dad is Pretty in Pink director Howard Deutch. "There's different elements of why I'm lucky to be—that term everyone loves—a nepo baby," she says, carefully rolling the phrase around her mouth. "The first is knowing that you can follow your dreams. And then there's picking things up via osmosis and understanding the ways of this world. But the truth is, I still feel like I am just getting my footing now after over 15 years."

As a teenager, Deutch traded a normal high school experience for a role on the Disney Channel show The Suite Life on Deck. Looking back, Deutch knows it all could have gone terribly awry. "The irony is that a lot of the Disney kids go to the dark side," she says. "But I had so much energy and so much ambition and so much drive, and I needed to place that energy somewhere."

She was also "really, really, really, really" hard on herself. That self-flagellation continued even as Deutch breezed through a succession of high-profile gigs, among them the rom-com Set It Up, the influencer satire Not Okay (which she executive-produced as well), and the Clint Eastwood thriller Juror #2. She also worked with Linklater before, on his 2016 college jock comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!

Linklater fans often assume his movies are heavily improvised. " Like all great art, it looks like it's so easy," Deutch says, grinning. "But no, he's meticulously crafted everything." That's an especially magical feat on Nouvelle Vague. The 28-year-old Godard shot Breathless (French title: A Bout de Souffle) guerrilla-style on the streets of Paris, using real people as extras, barking instructions at his actors on the fly, changing scenes as inspiration struck him, and calling it quits for the day as soon as he ran out of ideas.

"Yeah, it was the total opposite of how we're doing it!" Deutch remembers Linklater telling the cast and crew. She digs frantically through the papers on her desk until she finds a manifesto the director distributed to them. "Godard was going for spontaneity and immediacy," she reads aloud. One way to achieve a similar effect, Linklater wrote, is to "fully examine the scene from every angle, find new elements if they are to be found, and know it so well, and be so relaxed with what we are doing, that it seems spontaneous and improvised, that the performance is without artifice." Deutch loves that Linklater managed to inject a bit of the "hang out" vibe, perfected in early movies like Slacker and Dazed and Confused, into Nouvelle Vague. "There's nothing pretentious about the movie," she says. "You want to hang out with these people."

Although the movie aims to be historically accurate, it required the occasional dose of imagination. Deutch remembered the way that Linklater sometimes took inspiration from his actors behind the scenes and reverse engineered it. Noticing a scene in the real Breathless where Seberg's character is skipping, for example, Deutch had her version of Seberg skipping onto the movie set: "I really enjoyed that part. It made me feel like a little detective."

She also felt deep empathy for Seberg, who at the time of shooting Breathless was not the outspoken political activist she would later become but a 20-year-old traumatized by her brief time in Hollywood, faced with a French enfant terrible determined to change all the rules of moviemaking. "Seberg definitely had mixed feelings about Godard," Deutch says. "She acknowledged his genius, but I think she found him emotionally distant and manipulative. Later, she said something like, 'He wasn't interested in who I was, just in what I could represent.' That is a very powerful analysis of a young woman in a man's world."

Deutch, now30, says she's experiencing a second wind since going through her Saturn return—an astrological milestone that can mark someone's passage into adulthood. "I thought it was bullshit," she says, "but I really went through it and I refell in love with my job." She recently finished a stint on Broadway as Emily in Our Town and has two other movies out soon— The Threesome and Anniversary. There's also a long list of projects she'd like to make (a feminist werewolf movie, a family story in collaboration with her sister) and roles she'd like to play (Natalie Wood, Sally Bowles in Cabaret) as soon as she can stop and find time.

"I checked off a lot of boxes of things I was terrified of: I cut all my hair off, did a movie in a different language, and then had my Broadway debut," she says. "The question people ask when you're doing a play is: Don't you get bored of doing it every night? But I thought it was so healing to do it every night, because instead of going home and torturing myself over 'I should have done that' or 'Why did I do that?' you can go: Oh, I could try that tomorrow.... That was so healing for that part of myself I referenced earlier that was so, so hard on myself and so mean to myself."

Deutch furtively dabs her eyes with a tissue. "The second I start talking about doing that play, I cry because I love it," she says, "it's like a metaphor for life— we're so lucky to get one more shot to show up in the way that we want to."

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