Exploding Zoe

  Zoe Kazan is contemplating suicide. No, not in real life, where she’s doing just fine, thank you very much. But she’s had it with that dubious realm of interactivity known as Facebook. So it may be time for online suicide.  

“I think I’m getting off of it,” says the 26-year-old actress. “I’m getting requests from too many weirdoes. They send me these messages and I’m like, ‘I really don’t want to know what you thought about my tits, OK?’”

Kazan’s fleeting topless scene opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road hardly defines her potential in a slew of other screen and stage performances, and her expression of disgust over those perennial Facebook stalkers mainly seems like a point of pride rather than simply a need for privacy. Maybe it would have been a different story if they chose to compliment her acting strengths, too.

But there’s an additional level of depth to Kazan’s imminent Facebook departure, as it speaks to her tendency to resist the spotlight where so many other young female stars of the tenuous breakout variety waltz right into it. Of course, Kazan could do that with ease: Physically, she has the petite appeal of a Zooey Deschanel 2.0, her expressive blue eyes seemingly bursting out her diminutive noggin in an almost-hyperbolic image of pixie cuteness. But that’s exactly the kind of depiction that Kazan nimbly rejects.

“I actually think this is one of the ways that culture has operated to keep women in a subordinate position,” she says. “They have to think about their weight all the time, and not how they’re going to get ahead in the world. I would hope that the way I look is not where people put all their attention.”

As it happens, they do and they don’t: There are two versions of Zoe Kazan, at constant odds with each other. After her Revolutionary role, Kazan was situated as an indie starlet on the brink of major fame. She’s had a few gigs since then to support that contention, including appearances in the airtight studio productions It’s Complicated and I Hate Valentine’s Day, in addition to the overly cute Sundance breakout Happythankyoumoreplease. In late 2007, she was cast as the Flash’s wife in George Miller’s unrealized Justice League movie. New avenues of exposure enshroud her career.

But then there’s the other Zoe Kazan. The one visible as a shy New York college girl suffering from epileptic seizures and romantic confusion alike in Bradley Rust Gray’s poetically inspired The Exploding Girl. There’s the Zoe Kazan currently bounding around onstage as an aggressive weed dealer in Martin McDonagh’s new Broadway production A Behanding in Spokane, where she holds her own opposite a maniacal Christopher Walken on a daily basis. The potential here makes for an appealing contrast to the market-driven forces behind her nascent “It” girl status. But which side wins out? Kazan insists she’s content to evade the limelight—or maybe just mess with it.

“When people take on certain roles, I think they do it to be a movie or TV star,” she tells me. “I feel really lucky that I can play different roles.” That whole “I feel really lucky” racket sounds too familiar. I’m not convinced, and tell her so: You’re still doing Hollywood movies, I insist. People know your name.

“Oh, I know,” she says, and suddenly starts talking really fast. Defense mode. “I just mean, if you look at someone who took a lot of similar roles, look at—I don’t want to condemn anyone who’s still alive, but look at somebody like Katharine Hepburn. She played really similar roles over and over again. She made a whole career out of it. She was a very fine actress, there’s a certain thing that comes when you do that. People love you, but they identify you with that role. You don’t get that much range. I’m not interested in that.”

But Kazan wasn’t always so picky. After completing her undergraduate work at Yale, she began auditioning for various roles. It just so happened, she says, that the bad stuff didn’t gel with her style. “I auditioned for a lot of crap,” she says. “If I had been cast in any of it, things wouldn’t have worked out for me.” Pretentious but true: Kazan never put much effort into carving out a niche for herself. “The truth of the matter is that I don’t have some grand plan,” she says. “That would be cheesy. You just have to be ready. You can’t just be a kid with a crazy dream.”

Kazan may not realize it, but she simultaneously rejects and plays into the rise-to-fame myth: She has cultivated a name for herself and a résumé that gives her an aura of prestige, but remains free of the bonds typically  associated with young celebrities—particularly young women—in the entertainment industry. From Marilyn Monroe to Lindsay Lohan, America’s cult of personality has been historically unkind to youthful female performers. In general, they get pigeonholed as voracious sex bombs or tragic figures uncertain of the image they want to project. When Brittany Murphy died, pundits tended to focus on how sad she looked in photos. South Park wasn’t far off in its depiction of a country coming together for the joint slaughter of Britney Spears.

Kazan’s diversity of projects helps her maintain artistic cred, but she also remains free of industrial stigmas by the sheer virtue of her cuteness. Bear with me here: In Off-White Hollywood: American Culture and Ethnic Female Stardom, feminist scholar Diane Negra discusses the nascent career of Shirley Temple and her peers, identifying cuteness as “an image of juvenile vitality that displaced the specter of the wan, malnourished child of the Depression.” Perhaps this offers the connective tissue between Kazan’s various performances: She’s an adorable refuge from a contemporary climate marked by innumerable problems. Her characters tend to absorb other people’s issues.

In The Exploding Girl, she not only deals with her ailing relationship, but contends with the non-platonic feelings of her longtime friend. When Walken’s racist persona in Behanding casually drops the n-word, she admonishes him—while her black boyfriend remains silent. New York magazine called the character “a principled idiot.” The New York Times aptly described her onstage persona in The Seagull as “terminally unhappy,” but she remains determined. Time after time, it seems, Kazan portrays an aestheticized Face of Our Times.

Offstage and offscreen, Kazan lives a pretty ordinary life. With her boyfriend, Paul Dano—who watched her practice her fake seizures for The Exploding Girl—she likes to check out retrospectives of old movies at Film Forum and the Walter Reade Theater. She freely calls herself “a real flirt” and refers to acting as “just a business” that she doesn’t like to discuss among friends. She shuns constant suggestions from peers that she should move to L.A. “There’s no dearth of work here,” she says. Someone who knows her well said that her coquettish persona in Behanding is a “stupider” version of Kazan herself. “I have the courage of my convictions,” she says. She also has a famous relative, which probably doesn’t hurt, but Kazan—the granddaughter of legendary Hollywood director Elia—shrugs off the connection. “I assume that my last name opened doors at the beginning of my career, because people were curious about me in a way that they wouldn’t be if my name was Zoe Smith,” she says.

“But I would expect at this point that I wouldn’t be able to keep working just because of my last name.” Her parents are screenwriters. “They were just concerned I wouldn’t be able to make a living,” she says.

Nonetheless, I happen to run across an article from Variety in 1957 where Elia Kazan himself proclaims that “television has taken over as the medium of mediocrity,” justifying his decision to stick with film, just as his granddaughter has. So maybe it’s in her blood. Either way, Kazan’s hardly a figure of nepotism. She’s a righteous symbol, as far as those things go—but only to the extent that audiences can project their desires onto her poetically engrossing gaze. She may not play inspiring characters, but we root for them anyway. In essence, Kazan has perfected the art of the underdog.

In due time, Kazan will have to make some serious choices. Hollywood keeps calling and the flashy photo shoots beckon. She ought to stick with The Exploding Girl path, and she knows it. But right now, Kazan is watching a lot of bad movies, which she does for strategic purposes. “I don’t want to see something that’s going to have a big impact on me, because I don’t want it to affect the show I’m in,” she says. “So I go see a lot of really bad movies between shows.” Such as? “I saw Step Up 2: The Streets between shows,” she says. “It pumps you up, makes you feel good, and has no impact on you whatsoever.” With Behanding set for a 16-week run, she says, “I’ll be seeing a lot of bad movies.” But hopefully she won’t be cast in one. For now, her cultured set of values remains intact, but she knows the judgmental beast of the industry all too well. “It’s a reality that women get paid less than men and get worse roles,” she says. “But what are you gonna do, whine about it? It’s part of the entertainment system. I still get to play lots of great parts.” In her verbal resistance to industrial norms, Kazan provides a potentially seismic role model for young actresses in the era of celebrity oversaturation. Just don’t ask to be her friend on Facebook.