Eleven years ago, Richard Linklater told Zoey Deutch that he had a dream of one day casting her as Jean Seberg. At the time, the actress was only 19, shooting her first film role — a supporting part in Linklater’s laid-back coming-of-age comedy Everybody Wants Some — and nervous enough about just keeping that part.
“I was so sure the entire time we were filming that I was going to be cut out of the film,” says Deutch, now 30. “There were the normal intrusive thoughts of a 19-year-old, like, ‘He hates me,’ and ‘I’m terrible.’ But I also had read the full script and knew that you could easily just lift my character out if the movie was too long. So when he told me he wanted me to play Jean, I thought: ‘OK, maybe I’m not going to be cut out of the movie.’ ”
More than a decade later, that offhand comment has become a reality. Deutch stars as Seberg in Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, a black-and-white French-language love letter to the golden age of French cinema, debuting Nov. 14 on Netflix. The film dramatizes Jean-Luc Godard’s making of Breathless, the 1960 crime drama that helped define the French New Wave and turned Seberg into a pixie-cut icon.
Deutch grew up in L.A. in a family steeped in the film industry — her father is director Howard Deutch, her mother is actress-director Lea Thompson. She began auditioning while attending L.A. County High School for the Arts; it wasn’t long after graduating that she landed the part in Everybody Wants Some and flew to Austin to meet Linklater.
In typical Linklater fashion, he picked her up at the airport himself and cued up the film’s eventual soundtrack (including The Knack’s “My Sharona”) for the drive into town. The cast ended up living together on his ranch during filming. “To have this experience of working with somebody as a teenager and then again as a woman has been so enlightening,” she says of the surreal, full-circle moment of finally teaming with Linklater to play Seberg.
The fact that Deutch didn’t speak a lick of French didn’t dissuade her. She started language lessons well before the Nouvelle Vague contracts were finalized and chopped off her hair into Seberg’s signature crop. “I should find the email that Rick sent me a week before I cut it, saying maybe I should push it a little,” she says. “We didn’t have all the money yet, and he was afraid that I was going to cut my hair off and then the movie wasn’t going to happen.”
Before boarding the flight to Paris, her old anxieties crept back in. “I was like, who else is he talking to? What other actress has a better foreign value?” she says. But as soon as she touched down in the City of Light for the gonzo-style shoot, she slipped right into the vérité rhythm. It was a true indie — Netflix acquired the film out of Cannes — with no trailers or dressing rooms, just the cast and crew running around town, stealing shots on the fly. “I know this sort of life of chaos intimately,” she says. “I just finished a movie where we did a whole sequence of stealing shots on Hollywood Boulevard, with iPhone footage of me just acting with people, asking them to sign the waivers after the fact. Someone put a snake around my neck. I’m a changed woman.”
For a lot of her life, Deutch clung to the idea that the harder she was on herself, the better she would be as an actor. “I recently watched a really talented young actress do what I used to do, and I saw how counterproductive it was — and how much time and energy I wasted hating myself,” she says. Her acting teacher helped her create a character to represent that devil on her shoulder, and together they performed a ritual to say goodbye.
“You should hear me with Rick now,” she says with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘What do you think about doing a movie on Natalie Wood? What about a role on Merrily We Roll Along?” I can’t stop pitching myself.”
This story appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
