In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast features in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy actors and creators. Join host and senior editor Vinnie Mancuso for this guide to living the creative life from those who are doing it every day.
Zoey Deutch first worked with director Richard Linklater in 2016, costarring in the indie icon’s sports comedy “Everybody Wants Some!!” Nine years later, she’s re-teaming with the filmmaker for “Nouvelle Vague,” a biopic about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking 1960 film “Breathless,” in which she captures French New Wave icon Jean Seberg to uncanny effect. (The film hits Netflix on Nov. 14.)
A lot has happened for Deutch in between those two roles: the highs of standout performances like in the rom-com “Set It Up” and the darkly funny “Not Okay,” coupled with the lows of burnout caused by a personal process she describes as “work, work, work; do whatever you can; say yes; go, go, go.” Her number one takeaway—and the one she wants to impart on any aspiring actor—is the freedom that comes with being kinder to yourself. “I was so tough and mean to myself. Probably until I was 26, after every take, I would just have a look of like, what the fuck did I just do?” she tells us on the latest episode of In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast.
“I was so punishing to myself, because I thought maybe if I did that, nobody else could hurt me; nobody else could say anything worse to me than what I’m saying to myself. I thought it propelled me to be better, and I thought it was useful,” she continues. “Honestly, it kind of was at the beginning, and then it stopped being useful. It started being destructive.”
Reuniting with the same director after nearly a decade allowed Deutch to realize the ways she had grown. “The funny thing is, you have so much more time to do other things that are better for your work when you’re not being so fucking mean to yourself. You have more time and more space to create,” she says. “I was really able to identify that because it was the same director, the same methodology, the same way he works; that didn’t change, but I did.”
On this episode, Deutch discusses the process of playing Seberg, the early career devastation of being cut from 2012’s “The Amazing Spider-Man” and another film she “wanted so badly,” and how she learned to truly accept the twists and turns that come with being a working actor.
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