“Hey, Mabel, do you want some chicken?”
Zoey Deutch calls for her adorable dog during our Zoom meeting, days before the New York Film Festival premiere of her latest movie, Nouvelle Vague. “She is the love of my life,” the instantly disarming Deutch says about her mutt, while trying to show me a tattoo of Mabel’s face that she got on her ankle when she was 20. “This tattoo was an interesting choice, but I don’t regret it. I rescued her 11 years ago. I absolutely cannot live without dogs.”
Deutch’s organic on-camera warmth is hardly a surprise for anyone who’s followed her career since the 2010s and witnessed her bouncy charm light up a screen. Her major breakthrough came with Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! in 2016, the filmmaker’s signature loose-limbed rhythms elevated by Deutch’s easy star power. It was during the same project that Linklater wondered about Deutch’s interest in playing screen icon Jean Seberg in a movie that he was thinking of making.
Fast forward to 2025, and that in-passing conversation has become the masterful Nouvelle Vague, Linklater’s love letter to the French New Wave. On the surface, the glorious black-and-white concoction, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, tells the (mostly imagined) story of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s epoch-defining 1960 movie, Breathless. But at its heart, Nouvelle Vague is still a Linklater hangout film through and through; his flaneurs this time are just the likes of Godard (Guillaume Marbeck), François Truffaut (Adrien Rouyard), Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin), and Suzanne Schiffman (Jodie Ruth-Forest).
It is into that heady world of Cahiers du Cinéma writers and burgeoning filmmakers that Seberg enters—and with something to prove, having recently made two flops, Saint Joan (1957) and Bonjour Tristesse (1958), directed by the notoriously ill-tempered Otto Preminger. “Eliminate the star part, and you’re always trying to prove something regardless of where you are,” Deutch notes, describing the specific actorly headspace that she occupied for the project. “Seberg was plucked from obscurity in Marshalltown, Iowa. Saint Joan was a giant bomb. Bonjour Tristesse was a little better, but Preminger still traumatized her.”
Insights from Linklater, plus a meticulous script (by Holly Gent, Vincent Palmo Jr., Michèle Halberstadt, and Laetitia Masson) and her own deep research, helped Deutch to understand just how new Godard’s off-the-cuff shooting style would have seemed to Seberg, especially after suffering Preminger’s rigidity. “It was emotionally raw, creatively loose, and deeply unconventional compared to her Hollywood filmmaking,” she explains. But that didn’t make it easy. “There’s a quote of hers saying, ‘Godard never told me what was going to happen from one day to the next.’ Not only did she not have the foundation to navigate these waters, there was also the language barrier. People don’t realize that she was learning French when she was making this movie. She felt insecure at times, with Godard’s abstract directions and lack of emotional guidance. But she really respected his intellect and artistry.”
To do justice to the multifarious demands of the part, Deutch approached her job almost clinically, reaching for a medical allegory that she holds close with all her work. “When you’re sick, you have to attack it from all angles. You’re like, ‘I have to go the homeopathic route and the pharmaceutical route. I should go see a chiropractor, and so on.’ You can’t just have orange juice if you really need to get better. That’s my metaphor for acting too. You need to use all your tools.”
For the purposes of playing Seberg, that meant working with a movement coach, Jean-Louis Rodrigue (together, they imagined Seberg as a snow leopard); creating a “memory board” consisting of both Seberg’s real memories and ones that Deutch imagined for her; and building a dream journal to navigate all the nuances of the character. She also studied French rigorously for two years, plotting out when Seberg might toggle between the two languages and paying specific attention to the dialect that Seberg used. An old interview in which she gives a tour of her Paris apartment was especially helpful for Deutch. “I got more of her essence at that specific moment, when she was claiming this new identity in Europe. I transcribed it and learned it like a monologue and listened to it nonstop. When we were shooting, I would listen to it every morning as almost a voice warm-up. Then there was watching as much New Wave cinema as I possibly could, as well as rewatching Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse repeatedly. Of course, the bible of this whole experience was Breathless itself.”
Add Deutch’s physical transformation to all this “attack it from all angles” prep—the elegant costumes, the pixie haircut, and Seberg’s beauty marks—and the result is simply stunning. When Deutch walks across the storied Champs-Élysées in a mock turtleneck knit (an exact replica of the one Seberg wore while playing Patricia in Breathless), hollering “New York Herald Tribune!”, we don’t see an actor disappearing into just a part but into an era, a city, and a defining cultural movement. “It was very interesting because I’m doing an impression of her physicality while [playing] Patricia and doing an interpretation of Seberg at the same time.” When Nouvelle Vague played at the Telluride Film Festival recently, Deutch recalls, “someone who knew Jean Seberg well was very emotional about seeing her in a different light after being a skeptic of this movie. That made me happy.”
Did Linklater’s shooting style resemble Godard’s at all, I wonder? No, Deutch assures me. In fact, a rehearsal manifesto that Linklater shared with his cast and crew, which Deutch has framed in her office, emphasizes this in its opening graph:
Godard was going for a spontaneity, an immediacy, as were many painters and jazz musicians of the time. The notion of improvisation was in the air, the epitome of cool. To achieve that kind of freedom, you either have to be spontaneously brilliant (good luck with that!) or work incredibly hard—fully examine each scene from every angle, know it so well, and be so relaxed with what we’re doing that it seems spontaneous and improvised.
“Rick is a chill guy, but it’s a faux chillness,” she says. “You don’t get to be where he is by just being chill. He is intentional, brilliant, and direct, which is what you want in a leader. [That rehearsal manifesto] was brilliant, because it got everybody on the same page immediately. We were not doing what Godard did. That’s the essence of the movie: Make it the way you want to make it. Godard and Rick have a similar artistic integrity about listening to their inner compass. But as a filmmaker, Rick would say he’s more of a Truffaut than a Godard.”
What are Deutch’s career priorities these days? Primarily, taking on projects that put beauty and positivity out into the world. (This year she also starred in Chad Hartigan’s The Threesome, a winsome, humorous, and refreshingly nonjudgmental exploration of romance, sex, unplanned pregnancy, and different shades of reproductive freedom.) “I started in comedy, but [I was seeing] a lot of these one-dimensional female characters in male-driven comedies,” she remembers. “And that was not what I wanted to do. So I pivoted and was attracted to these ‘unlikable’ female characters, a lot of scammers, like in Buffaloed, Flower, and Not Okay—these high-octane, intense, and morally ambiguous people that were so satisfying and fun to play.” Over the last couple of years, however, she’d moved away from those roles. “I got to do this beautiful movie with Clint Eastwood, Juror #2. And I did Our Town on Broadway, which changed me. I’m now gravitating toward a different thing, which is what happens as you grow up. It is less about proving what I could do and more about being a vessel for beautiful messaging that could change the way somebody feels about their life. It is bigger than myself.”