It's 11am and the pink retro coffee counter at the Beverly Hills Hotel is crowded but silent. A man on the other side of the room asks for a refill, and his words hang in the air like a gunshot. I'll be interviewing Zooey Deschanel here any moment, and our conversation will be these people's morning entertainment. It makes me nervous.
If the guy asing for coffee was a gunshot, when Zooey arrived it was D-day on the beaches of Normandy. "I have a modulation problem," she confesses. Either oblivious to our audience or just utterly unselfconscious, Zooey spoke loudly and candidly about her life, aspirations, and recent success.
Zooey's theatrical debut came at age two, in a standout performance as the third little pig (the sensible one) in a nursery school production. Although her early ambition was to follow it up with some kind of television gig, her mother refused to let her go to auditions until she could drive herself to them.
Her creative outlet instead became putting on plays (and causing trouble) with her older sister at her parents house (where she still lives). "I was always really girly in that I wore dresses all the time, but in some ways we were like boys in our energy level. We'd run around like crazy knocking things over, then we'd get mad at each other and beat each other up. The energy was at a fever pitch at all times. I was hard to control us."
Whether being protective or just lazy, her mother may have done Zooey a favor by sheilding her from the life of a child actor.
"I was kind of an awkward kid. When I was really young I was cute, but then I was like, fat for awhile, and I don't think anyone would have chosen me unless they wanted a fat little girl." It'd have been a lot for young Zooey to take. "A lot of the time it's really hard on your self-esteem; auditioning is basically going on job interviews all the time and getting rejected every time. Ninety nine percent of the time, you get rejected."
Still, the trauma of adolescence is a wage we all have to pay, and in avoiding the trails of the child star, you're only exchanging them for the trials of an American childhood.
"I was in the principal's office every day between fourth and sixth grade. I'd talk out of turn, get up and run around, and disrupt the classroom." The biggest trouble she ever got in? "I hit this kid in third grade with a pencil. They sent me home. He would taunt and tease me all the time. He'd turn to me and say, 'You like me. You have a big crush on me.' And I'd go, 'No I don't!' And he'd go, 'Yes you do, you like me," and the girl next to him who was this annoying little twerp would go, 'Yes you do! You like him!' So finally I said 'Shut up!' and I hit him."
Did you like him?
"I didn't like him. He was a jerk. Why would I like him?
Typically, middle school was when things really got tough. "Seventh grade was horrible. I was teased relentlessly because I was chubby. Then in the summer I lost all this weight, and all of a sudden everybody liked me. It was weird, because then I didn't trust anybody. I thought, 'they just like me because I'm thin.' It gives people a complex. Somebody actually spit in my face in seventh grade. There was this girl - oh, she was so horrible, and she was with the popular kids, you know - and I said, 'Hey, remember when our sisters were in that play together?' She just turned around and spit in my face."
"But I'm actually oddly thankful for a lot of these things, because when I was really teased and tourtured and all these things, it made me really ambitious. It made me work hard. Friends weren't something that I could rely on, but my love for performing was always a constant."
That love was on display in standout performances in Mumford and Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous. This year Zooey with appear in Barry Sonnenfeld's Big Trouble, and The New Guy, a teen comedy where she can be seen performing "Play That Funky Music White Boy." But Zooey is a lot smarter than the typical young actress, and she's hoping to push herself in future roles in ways that she wishes Hollywood would push itself.
"I don't want to go to another roller-coaster ride of a movie. If I want that, I'll go to Magic Mountain. I'm really interested in the young directors that are doing different things in cinema. I think the movies people will hold onto are the Rushmores and the Being John Malkoviches. Those are the kind of films I want to do; that's what I'm passionate about."