Sparkling actress, accomplished musician, passed by indie films in the 2000s before being put into orbit by the success of the series “New Girl”, Zooey Deschanel has somewhat disappeared from the radar screens. What has she become?
Not so long ago, the small world of cinema and series regularly saw actresses playing the eternal roles of sparkling women, always positive and well anchored in pop culture. Ideal, fanciful and sassy women. In 2007, film critic Nathan Rabin invented a word to characterize this archetypal character: the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
If this term designates according to its author a narrative device aiming to facilitate the psychological evolution of the main character, originally describing the character of Kirsten Dunst in Encounters at Elizabethtown, the expression has been wrongly generalized to many characters or even to real people. Like the actress Zooey Deschanel precisely.
True “It Girl” in the middle of the years 2000-2010, known for her film roles in Almost famous, Phenomena, Elf, H2G2: the guide to the galactic traveler, the pretty indie dramatic comedy (500) days together, and of course the hugely successful series New Girl, Zooey Deschanel was at the top. However, after the end of New Girl in 2018 after seven seasons, her acting career slowed significantly.
Born into a family of artists (her father, Caleb Deschanel, is a director of photography, and her mother, Mary Jo Deschanel, notably distinguished herself as an actress in Twin Peaks), Zooey Deschanel began her career in 1998 in the series Les Below de Veronica and landed her first role on the big screen in Mumford (1999). She then left university to devote herself to acting.
His score in almost famous (2000) revealed it to the general public, and Zooey Deschanel’s notoriety then began to spread. During the 2000s, she can be seen alongside Jennifer Aniston and Jake Gyllenhaal in The Good Girl (2002), in the crazy science fiction film H2G2: the galactic traveler’s guide (2005), in the romantic comedy Playboy to seize (2006) or in the masterpiece The Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford in 2007.
An excellent musician, her talents as a singer enabled her to obtain roles in Elf (2003) and in the Disney movie Once upon a mattress (2005). She became one of the recurring characters in the Weeds series and finally rose to fame in 2008 when M. Night Shyamalan gave her the lead female role in his Phenomena, in which she played Mark Wahlberg’s wife.
Here is the trailer again, for fun…
In 2011, she became the headliner of New Girl, in the guise of Jessica Day, a naive and crazy young woman, but unhappy in love since her boyfriend cheated on her and then left her. She thus shares her joys and sorrows in a roommate with three boys: Nick, a bartender; Schmidt, a white-collar worker who thinks he’s Casanova; and Winston, a former basketball player.
fox
Nominated in 2012 for an Emmy Award in the category of Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series, her series is an absolute hit for Fox. In 2012, Zooey Deschanel was also ranked 8th in the list of the 20 highest paid actresses on American TV, with an annual salary of $9 million.
In parallel, she knows a real success with her musical group She&Him. His debut album, “Volume One”, sold over 300,000 copies in the United States. Six albums later (the last, a tribute to Brian Wilson, was released last year), the band still intends to continue touring.
Zooey Deschanel in music, what does it give? Little excerpt…
Mother of two children, born in 2015 and 2017 respectively, the actress said in 2018 that she was in no more hurry than that to return to the cameras, preferring to focus on her role as a mother. An eminently respectable choice.
Jack-of-all-trades, Zooey Deschanel is multi-card. She has lent her voice in animated films (Les Trolls and its sequel), presented a web series devoted to vegan and vegetarian food (“Your Food’s Roots”); launched a website in 2011, HelloGigglespresented as a “Positive online community for female-identifying female readers, providing coverage of the latest in beauty and style, relationships, careers and money, culture, identity, and more… “. Sold in 2015 for an official amount not communicated but estimated at around $30 millionshe continues to keep an eye on her creation.
And, like many of her colleagues, she has also launched a podcast, called Welcome to Our Show. Accompanied by Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris, two of the series’ headliners New Girl, she comes back precisely in anecdotes on this one. To date, there are nearly 60 episodes. If you’re nostalgic for Jessica Day, you know what you have to do!