I know Zoe Kazan from the really delightful romcom she starred in with Daniel Radcliffe, What If, which is available on demand from Showtime if you’re a subscriber. (Free plug for Showtime – their original shows, like Ray Donovan and Shameless, make it well worth the subscription, as do their movies. Disclosure – they give us advanced access to their shows online. We will plug the hell out of any service that does this. Get on board, HBO.) Zoe, 33, is a talented character actress who does a lot of work on stage. She’s currently starring in the off-Broadway play Love, Love, Love, which is getting rave reviews along with praise for Kazan’s performance. Zoe is also a writer, she’s written three plays and has a film she adapted coming out next year in which her boyfriend of ten years, Paul Dano, stars. In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Kazan explains that she’s perfectly happy playing secondary roles and working in plays. She also discusses her teenage bout with anorexia, which she opened up about in a first person essay published last month. Normally I wouldn’t cover Zoe but I was really impressed with her interview and a lot of what she said resonated with me.

On her career
“It’s just what happened. It was what was available to me, and the roles that were really interesting to me. There are fewer films made at a studio level I like than were made 15 years ago.

“I didn’t have the Hollywood dream. I didn’t want to be an actor like Brad Pitt. I auditioned for the school play when I was 14 and came home and was like, ‘This is what I’m supposed to do with my life.’ It was more like a falling-in-love experience. I had that thing inside of myself, without which you can’t get through the terrible rejection that comes with being an actor.”

On body and self image
“I’m lucky. I’m slim. I am lucky that I’ve never been told by my agents that I had to lose weight. When I met my now-agent, I told her, ‘You can’t ever tell me to lose weight because I won’t respond well to it, and I’ll fire you if you tell me to.’ Going through my eating disorder allowed me to put certain boundaries up that I wouldn’t have known how to put up for myself otherwise.

“How many times have I been told, ‘You’re not pretty enough.’ That sucks, but you don’t have any control over that. You get told, ‘You didn’t get this part ‘cos they wanted a different look.’ That’s the code-word.”

On how she’s feeling after the election
“I can still hardly read the news. It’s really hard. It’s upsetting. I’m not being loud and speaking up in order to be a person who’s loud and speaking up. I’m doing it because I don’t feel I have any other choice right now.

“If we don’t raise our voices, we are inviting something so dark into this country I can’t begin to fathom it. The way people are talking about Hitler is totally apropos. The way Trump is trying to marginalize and dehumanize certain people in this country is criminal and un-American, and as a country we’ve always struggled and strived to live up to the ideals our country stands for.”

On Trump’s plans for the country and activism
“I can’t fathom that the country where we want to be is the country where Muslims have to register, or are not allowed in this country, or where gay people have their rights revoked or women have their rights revoked or black people and Jews are targeted or considered sub-human.

“Our rights will recover but our planet will not, and I feel something very precious is being taken from us every day, and he is far more dangerous than the media is reporting on. I have very little hope right now but a tremendous amount of fight left in me. I don’t see any reason to stop. We have to be our own watchdogs right now.”

[From The Daily Beast]

I cosign all of what she said about politics. There is no way to be “nice” when things get this obvious and ridiculous. There is no way to play fair when it’s a concept that’s foreign to the other side and the entire reason they’re in power. Honestly we do get hate mail for covering politics. We get told to stay in our lane and only cover celebrity gossip. We are not going to stop covering politics because there is no longer a division between politics and entertainment. There is an unhinged reality TV star who is about to take office. Entertainment and politics have collided and created a baby-fisted monster.

As much as Kazan’s interview felt like a rallying cry, she did defend her friend Lena Dunham while completely missing the point of why people call out Lena. She chalked it up to misogyny, saying “She’s very powerful, and that’s why people are so hard on her. I think if this election has taught us anything it’s that misogyny is alive and well in this country, and smart, powerful women get a lot of rough treatment, especially by the media.” They do, but sometimes that’s warranted. It is definitely aimed more at women however I don’t think Lena is a decent example of that.

These two are so cute together.

photos credit: WENN.com