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Meet Zoe Kazan: one half of Hollywood's new-gen power couple

BOTTEGA VENETA coat, £8,465; jumpsuit, £2,005 (bottegaveneta.com). By Pariah necklace, £1,095 (bypariah.com): Anya Holdstock
BOTTEGA VENETA coat, £8,465; jumpsuit, £2,005 (bottegaveneta.com). By Pariah necklace, £1,095 (bypariah.com): Anya Holdstock

Zoe Kazan is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter and an actor familiar to British audiences for indie hits such as The Big Sick and Ruby Sparks. Despite this, I almost miss the slight, dark figure who slips past me in the lobby of the Corinthia Hotel.

Kazan is tiny and looks younger than her 35 years, which is one of the reasons she is vocal about correcting journalists’ preconceptions on Twitter. ‘I felt like being youthful looking and being diminutive and having big eyes made people sitting across from me make assumptions about who I was that were not true,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like feeling underestimated.’

She is extraordinarily focused. We spend quite some time discussing her role in the new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Wildlife, the film co-written with and directed by her long-term partner, actor Paul Dano, before she reveals that she and Dano have also just had their first child. Their six-week-old daughter, Alma, is upstairs sleeping. Back home, her parents flew from LA to Brooklyn to help out but, for this trip, London friends (their circle includes Eddie Redmayne) have helped them arrange emergency childcare.

‘It’s a really weird time, it’s very, very strange,’ Kazan says, widening her eyes. ‘Any piece of this fall would feel like a red letter day, but altogether it’s a little overwhelming. Everything looks different on the other side of having a child. It’s terrifying. We’re only six weeks in so we are trying to learn a lot about this person and what they need, and how to do the really simple things that seasoned parents know how to do. We both [planned to] put aside this time not to work so we could be with our baby, but at four weeks I was doing fittings for press events.’

STELLA McCARTNEY dress, £910 (stellamccartney.com). BY PARIAH necklace, £1,450 (bypariah.com) (Anya Holdstock)
STELLA McCARTNEY dress, £910 (stellamccartney.com). BY PARIAH necklace, £1,450 (bypariah.com) (Anya Holdstock)

That’s showbiz: you wait ages to do an exciting film and then two come out in the UK a month after you’ve had a baby. We turn first to Buster Scruggs, an anthology of brutally comic Western stories in which Kazan plays Alice Longabaugh, a solemn girl riding a wagon train towards an uncertain future in Oregon.

‘When the email came from my agent I didn’t have to read past “the Coen Brothers” before saying, “I’ll be wherever they want me to be, whenever they want me”,’ she says. ‘To work with them was a complete dream. Reading the script I had an uncanny feeling that doesn’t come often — “Oh, this could be my part.” I felt so anxious going into the callback [after the first audition], I felt like I was going to die.’ On the day, she found herself acting alongside actor Bill Heck, with whom she’d co-starred for six months in Angels in America on Broadway, and both of them were duly cast.

The film depicts a wry but bloody world of murderous singing outlaws and ‘Injun’ war parties, sideshow freaks and bank robbers, but although there are few women in it, Kazan describes the set as ‘one of the most gender neutral places I’ve ever been in my life’. The brothers were humorous, quiet presences behind the camera, with a shorthand that comes from working with the same crew for 30 years.

Wildlife is, arguably, even more of a labour of love. She and Dano — who acted Daniel Day-Lewis off the screen in There Will be Blood, and more recently played Pierre in the BBC’s War & Peace — got together while they were performing in an off-Broadway play in 2007. They’ve since co-starred in Meek’s Cutoff and Ruby Sparks — about a writer whose fictional romantic ideal comes to life — for which Kazan wrote the script.

DIOR jumper, £1,200 (dior.com) (Anya Holdstock)
DIOR jumper, £1,200 (dior.com) (Anya Holdstock)

‘We’ve acted together three times,’ she says. ‘I don’t think we’ll do that again. It’s very hard because you’re spending all day together on set, and then you’re going home together. There’s no other person in the relationship making sure that there’s food in the fridge and toilet paper.’ Dano had wanted to direct for a long time, and wrote a screenplay based on Richard Ford’s book, Wildlife, about a son observing his parents’ marriage failing in 1960. He asked Kazan to read it ‘and I kept saying, “This is not a script,” and we started to argue over it, and finally I said, “I think it would be simpler if I just rewrite this,” and he agreed’.

They batted the script back and forth. He caught the spirit of the book, she did the structure: ‘I like to put things in order, I’m a systems kind of person. Our spices at home are beautifully alphabetised.’ There seems to be no element of competitiveness in their relationship. ‘I actually can’t imagine being jealous of him or him being jealous of me,’ says Kazan. ‘His happiness means so much to me. I think it’s easier for me to be proud of him than it is for me to be proud of myself and vice versa.’

The film, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, is an accomplished, quietly moving work. It’s also, like two of Kazan’s plays, about an unhappy family. But it seems any conjecture that they are autobiographical works is another journalistic assumption. ‘I honestly think I had one of the happiest childhoods you could ever ask for,’ she says. ‘No life is without its challenges, but mine weren’t because of my parents.’

Kazan was anorexic in her teens and 20s, and wrote a brilliantly frank account of conquering the condition in The New York Times in 2016. ‘It was just after the election, and they gave me an open-ended assignment,’ she says, ‘and the only thing I could think of was to say something that might make other women feel less lonely and feel stronger. Also I had seen some chatter in my Instagram comments and on Twitter about “thinspiration” and felt really angry, because I don’t want any girl to look at me and think that I’m torturing myself to have my body look a certain way, because I’ve worked so hard to not have that be true.’

She grew up a showbiz insider with screenwriter parents, Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord, but insists it wasn’t a glamorous childhood. She and her younger sister, Maya, were denied video games and forced to play outside. ‘My dad was nominated for an Academy Award [in 1991 for Reversal of Fortune] when I was seven, but it wasn’t Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ she says. ‘Almost everyone I knew growing up was in the business in some very unglamorous way; like, their parents were jobbing actors or carpenters building sets.’

Zoe Kazan and director Paul Dano (Getty)
Zoe Kazan and director Paul Dano (Getty)

Writing did not initially appeal. ‘It looked lonely to me,’ she says. ‘I was an explosively emotional child. When I found acting, it felt like I had found a place for all my messy bits.’ She started writing later, to fill up the downtime between jobs, and she now sees it — in a very clear-eyed way — as a means of sustaining a career in the face of the decline in opportunities for older actresses. Would she bring a play to London? ‘I have no plans, but that would be wonderful,’ she says. Thanks to War & Peace, London is the only place she and Dano have been shadowed by the tabloids, which she finds hilarious.

Her sister Maya also became an actor, and I wonder if the Kazan name was a help or a hindrance to them. Though her parents were respected but not famous, her grandfather, a Greek born in what is now Istanbul, became a major figure in postwar Hollywood, directing On the Waterfront and East of Eden. But he also gave up the names of left-wing colleagues to Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt. Kazan says she fought hard against accusations of nepotism, turning up for her first Broadway callback — an adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie starring Cynthia Nixon — having learned the whole play.

She was also bemused by the hostility that pursued her grandfather — an immigrant who perhaps felt he had to prove his own American-ness — until his death in 2003. ‘It felt like people were standing in judgment from a place of safety,’ Kazan says. ‘Well, now it feels a lot less safe. If you felt you would have done differently to him, now is a good time to prove that you would have.’

We’ve acknowledged the orange elephant in the room. Kazan, whose friends include Lena Dunham and Meryl Streep’s daughters, campaigned for Hillary Clinton, was devastated by Donald Trump’s election and was lobbying her fans on Twitter to vote for the Democrats in last week’s midterms. ‘I’m tremendously heartened by the enormous spike in voter registration and in the numbers of women running for office in our country,’ she says.

But she is wary of hoping too much. She was vocal, too, about the climate of sexual harassment in showbiz but thinks recent talk about the first anniversary of the #MeToo movement suggests the outpouring of anger was a one-off, a blip that can now be consigned to history. As a new mother of a very young daughter, the UN report on climate change also upset her badly: the rights of women and minorities may recover from recent onslaughts, but ‘our planet won’t recover. I’m very scared and horrified and I don’t know how to speak my rage and outrage clearly enough.’ She tears up when she speaks of this, which is why she would never consider a career in politics herself. ‘Too emotional,’ she says.

Dano has a big Showtime series coming up, Escape at Dannemora, directed by Ben Stiller, but once the hubbub for that, and Wildlife and Buster Scruggs, has subsided, he and Kazan will return to Brooklyn to get on with the job of being parents. Not that their life was exactly showbizzy before Alma’s arrival. ‘We read, we go to movies, we make pasta and watch the Great British baking show,’ she says. ‘A pretty quiet life.’ She gets up to go, and disappears again into the crowd.

‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ is on Netflix from November 16.

Hair by Akiko Kawasaki using Davines.

Make-up by Camilla Hewitt using MAC.

Stylist’s assistant: Jessica Skeete-Cross