Spotlight: Zooey Deschanel

Eulogy

Zooey Deschanel has her feet firmly planted in two different worlds. "She'll be talking about what a fun dinner she had the night before," says Will Ferrell, her costar in Elf and the upcoming drama Winter Passing, "and then go into this scene where she has to cry her eyes out. Then the director yells cut, and she's right back to, 'Anyway, I had the pasta with the fish....'" It was this kind of duality that impressed first-time feature director Clancy when he was casting the dark comedy Eulogy. "We needed somebody who could be sensible enough to narrate the story," he says, "and yet unique enough to be related to this crazy family." The 24-year-old Deschanel stars as the sanest member of a dysfunctional brood mourning the death of their patriarch (Rip Torn). Between a pothead father (Azaria), and unctuous uncle (Romano), a judgmental aunt (Winger), and a suicidal Grandma (Laurie), "it became the task of my character to try and instill some logic in my family," Deschanel says.
Her own family is steeped in cinema: Her father, Caleb, is an Oscar-nominated cinematographer (The Right Stuff, The Passion of the Christ), and mother Mary Jo is an actress (The Right Stuff, TV's Twin Peaks). "My dad showed me Hitchcock and Kubrick movies when I was a kid," says Deschanel, who now frequents Hollywood's revival houses with her boyfriend, Rushmore's Jason Schwartzman. "I'm interested in the way people lived in times that aren't my own."
Although she "auditioned for all those teen movies" when she started out, she didn't really fit the Road Trip mold. "Pople [would say], 'Well, who's she like?' 'Nobody.' I always held on to that." Fortunately, whose who appreciated her singular qualities include the directors of Almost Famous, The Good Girl, All the Real Girls, and the blockbuster Elf.
Next, she'll play a drug-addicted actress in Winter Passing and straddle two realms once again as the half-alien, half-human scientist Trillion in the long-awaited screen version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "We did a scene where these enemy Vogons fire at us," she says of Hitchhiker's. "I got hit by one of the fake bullets - it broke the skin, and I have a big welt. But" - her voice perks up, gears already changing again - "I feel sort of proud of it. It's like my little battle scar."