Zoey Deutch’s Lessons for Life

Something cosmic was afoot in 2024, at least for Zoey Deutch, who made her Broadway debut in an acclaimed revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a few months before appearing in Clint Eastwood’s courtroom thriller Juror #2. The actor, seen across the past decade in films by an impressive roster of collaborators, last year found herself in the middle of a professional situation too good to be true on its own, and too perspective-shifting to not be immensely humbling. “There was a lot of hard work,” she admitted on a Zoom call last December, “but a lot of manifestation and a lot of delusional thinking, to be honest.”

Like many in showbiz, she’d fallen early for Our Town, one of a handful considered the greatest American play, and the character of Emily Webb, a small-town girl whose teenage courtship, adult marriage, and (spoiler for the 1938 classic) then early arrival in the afterlife the three-act play follows. She decided to action this dream a few years ago, getting an apartment in New York City in the hopes someone would revive it and cast her—despite having no professional stage experience and having never booked a part from an un-auditioned offer (except those the enterprising thirty-year-old had produced or developed on her own). Eventually, her agent knew who to put forth when he caught word that Kenny Leon was looking to remount the play on Broadway for the first time since 2002. The director was hesitant, but responded, she thinks, to her passion and offered her the role, opposite a starry ensemble of stage and screen veterans including Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes.

“There has never been a process like this for me,” Deutch says. “I know I’m not the first or even third or fourth or fifth or tenth thought when it comes to Emily Webb. There’s this lesson I got from it that if you really are super clear about wanting something, the universe might conspire to assist you. I have never been so intentional. I worked really hard to get it, but I was lucky enough that they heard me when I said that I will work my ass off, I will do whatever it takes, please trust me, I need to play this part.”

Nearing the end of the show’s limited run, Deutch seems to have more gratitude than she knows what to do with. For the actual gig, yes, but also for the things the character opened up to her. Emily Webb carries much of the play’s emotional heft: she dies during childbirth and is given the chance to return to Earth for a day. She chooses to relive her twelfth birthday, and the experience—of seeing loved ones mill about, making unseen kind gestures and never grasping the fragility of life—quickly becomes overwhelming. (“So all that was going on and we never noticed” became Deutch’s favorite line of the ensuing monologue.) The work ends on a pensive note; not upbeat, not dejected, but genuinely appreciative.

“I think it’s what people mean when they talk about art healing,” she says. “The more I do it, the more I have this feeling that what I want to convey is not sad. She’s wrestling with these two worlds. Until she goes back and sees what she sees, she’s not able to sink into the peacefulness that comes next. There’s this heaviness that we hold with death, but the beauty of the third act is that [the dead] are not sad, they’re peaceful. There’s resolve. So sometimes, when I’m in the third act, I feel like I hear people that I love and miss telling me they’re okay.”

Though Deutch said there have been two shows where the words made her cry “way too early,” she’s yet to find the role overwhelming and never hit the wall many stage actors encounter during an eight-show-week run.

“It really is a healing experience to be able to think this person I miss so much is okay. It doesn’t feel like I’m convincing myself or trying to make myself better because I miss them or I’m scared of death. It really feels, profoundly, like someone I love telling me it’s not so bad over there,” she adds.

That sense of learning through quiet observation extended to the staging itself, which often leaves characters visible even when not featured in a scene. Deutch herself spends a fair amount of time peeking below at the townspeople from a barn window upstage. Leon, she says, also kept the cast together throughout every rehearsal, which allowed her to absorb as much stage business as possible. Like Emily, Deutch speaks fondly, already even wistfully, for the repetitive minutiae of Broadway life. Having lived from film set to film set, she’ll miss sharing a dressing room with her co-star Safiya Kaijya Harris, getting the same juice every day, and greeting her colleague Willy at the door of the Barrymore Theater. (She won’t miss having to explain to her dermatologist that her skin had broken out due to the bacon grease pumped into the house—a device borrowed from an earlier Off Broadway production that sensorily reproduces the nostalgia of her character’s birthday breakfast.)

And from Leon, she’ll miss the unintentional lessons the director would impart, most significantly one that made her re-examine the way she modulates her voice. While in rehearsals, Deutch chose to use her higher register for the early scenes where she plays Emily’s childhood, a decision Leon insisted would not work.

“He said nobody would believe that I am eleven years old onstage, so why would I raise the register of my voice? It comes across insincere and performative and immediately takes you out,” she explains. “Those were not his words, but that’s how I perceived it, and I started to notice the areas of my life where I raise my voice. It was always moments where I was being insincere...whether in situations where I feel scared or want to be liked, or want to make myself smaller, I get a little higher. I started to recognize and identify that in myself, which wasn’t necessarily his intention, but the great thing about great teachers is that they might lead you in one direction and, when it’s the truth, it opens up a whole other world.”

A year earlier, the universe had conspired to return Deutch to her Rebel in the Rye co-star Nicholas Hoult, by way of a self-tape audition she’d sent Clint Eastwood nearly a decade ago which had then received crickets. She thought Hoult (whom she’d befriended and long admired since his breakout role on Skins) had put in a good word when she learned she’d be playing his wife in Juror #2, which came out this past November, but it was that eight-year-old video that had stuck in the director’s mind. Unlike the all-hands-on-deck directing style she’d come to love with Leon, Eastwood’s was a more detached, trusting approach. “Once he casts you, it’s yours, you run with it, you do what you feel,” she explains.

All the lore she’d heard about the legendary filmmaker was true, to a certain extent: he likes short shoots with only one or two takes, gives minimal direction, and never yells “action” or “cut.” As with all laws, she emphasized, there’s further depth. Workdays on an Eastwood shoot are brief because of his exacting clarity and, though it could be scary to go without any notes, Deutch appreciated the trust he has for his actors and ultimately found her director’s no-frills attitude refreshing. And his aversion to yelling on set, she learned, comes from his time acting on Westerns, where he noticed horses getting spooked by the sudden noise and felt humans shouldn’t have their own nervous systems similarly provoked on command.

“The trust and consideration he had for actors just grew, so that's why when you go on set, it's basically go time,” she says. “It’s a very well-oiled world. One of the things that I loved about being on his set was the calmness and the focused energy and how that fed into the scenes and the feeling of them being very intimate. No one’s coming in and doing touch ups. Once you’re on set, you’re there to work.”

Deutch is already thankful for having received another chance to team back up with a dream collaborator, Richard Linklater: his film Nouvelle Vague, in which she plays Jean Seberg, will premiere sometime this year. She remembers two characteristically casual comments the director had made when they worked on the 2016 film Everybody Wants Some!!!. One was about wanting to shoot a musical over a long stretch of time, which was then revealed to be the soon-to-be long-awaited film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. The other was a passing question of whether she knew who Seberg was. “The thing about Rick is that you have to listen very carefully because he means what he says,” Deutch laughs. “There’s no grand statement there, but he means what he says when he says it. He is the antithesis of Hollywood bullshit.”

With Our Town in its final week of performances, the actor hopes to reunite with Leon and the New York stage, having fallen for the all-in process of putting a play together. (“I was devastated when the rehearsal process was over…I know that sounds dramatic, but I am an actor.”) She was taken aback by the differences in letting go of a film and a play. Making a movie, she explains, is about giving your all—caring so deeply about the shoot, then handing it off. In theater, meanwhile, once the creative process is over, the actual run of the play begins. Though she didn’t expect to be so sad, it feels she wouldn’t have it any other way: Emily, her routine, her castmates, her life in Our Town, have all become part of her.

Our Town continues through Sunday at the Barrymore Theatre, New York. Juror #2 is now available to stream.