{"id":866222,"date":"2025-08-18T23:13:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T04:13:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/18\/how-zoey-deutch-became-nouvelle-vagues-jean-seberg\/"},"modified":"2025-08-18T23:13:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T04:13:17","slug":"how-zoey-deutch-became-nouvelle-vagues-jean-seberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/18\/how-zoey-deutch-became-nouvelle-vagues-jean-seberg\/","title":{"rendered":"How Zoey Deutch Became Nouvelle Vague\u2019s Jean Seberg"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About 10 years ago, just as Zoey Deutch<\/a>\u2019s film career was beginning to take off, Richard Linklater<\/a> casually mentioned that he wanted to cast her as Jean Seberg. The director was considering a movie about the making of Breathless<\/a>,<\/em> Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s first contribution to the French New Wave crusade to radically reinvent film. Deutch was intrigued. What cinephile doesn\u2019t have an image of Seberg, with cropped pixie hair and a New York Herald Tribune<\/em> T-shirt, seared into their memory?<\/p>\n

\u201cI totally fell in love with her,\u201d Deutch says of Seberg, whom she went on to play in Linklater\u2019s long-incubating Nouvelle Vague,<\/em> which will be released this fall. \u201cShe was very mysterious, which I feel is the opposite of me\u2014I\u2019m the least mysterious person, and I worried about how to tap into that.\u201d But Linklater\u2019s decision to shoot in black and white in Paris with a French cast and crew gave Deutch a tangible connection to her role: \u201cSeberg was learning French while acting in Breathless<\/em> and said she felt very insecure. That really helped me, because I was also insecure about my French.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Dress by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; tights by Falke; earrings by Swarovski.<\/p>\n

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The two women seem to have little else in common. Seberg was plucked out of small-town Iowa as a teenager to star in the film Saint Joan,<\/em> directed by Otto Preminger, who became her sadistic Svengali. She was burned while shooting the movie\u2019s climactic scene and then emotionally scorched when the critics and public tore her fledgling performance to shreds. \u201cNo one can handle that kind of energy coming your way,\u201d Deutch says, \u201cbut when you have no support and no foundation, it\u2019s traumatic.\u201d After Breathless,<\/em> Seberg would come to symbolize the young, liberated American woman at the dawn of the \u201960s.<\/p>\n

Deutch grew up in Los Angeles. Her mom is Back to the Future<\/em> star Lea Thompson; her dad is Pretty in Pink<\/em> director Howard Deutch. \u201cThere\u2019s different elements of why I\u2019m lucky to be\u2014that term everyone loves\u2014a nepo baby,\u201d she says, carefully rolling the phrase around her mouth. \u201cThe first is knowing that you can follow your dreams. And then there\u2019s picking things up via osmosis and understanding the ways of this world. But the truth is, I still feel like I am just getting my footing now after over 15 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a teenager, Deutch traded a normal high school experience for a role on the Disney Channel show The Suite Life on Deck.<\/em> Looking back, Deutch knows it all could have gone terribly awry. \u201cThe irony is that a lot of the Disney kids go to the dark side,\u201d she says. \u201cBut I had so much energy and so much ambition and so much drive, and I needed to place that energy somewhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Jacket by Prada; earrings by Tiffany & Co.<\/p>\n

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She was also \u201creally, really, really, really\u201d hard on herself. That self-flagellation continued even as Deutch breezed through a succession of high-profile gigs, among them the rom-com Set It Up,<\/em> the influencer satire Not Okay<\/em> (which she executive-produced as well), and the Clint Eastwood thriller Juror #2<\/a>.<\/em> She also worked with Linklater before, on his 2016 college jock comedy, Everybody Wants Some!!<\/em><\/p>\n

Linklater fans often assume his movies are heavily improvised. \u201cLike all great art, it looks like it\u2019s so easy,\u201d Deutch says, grinning. \u201cBut no, he\u2019s meticulously crafted everything.\u201d That\u2019s an especially magical feat on Nouvelle Vague.<\/em> The 28-year-old Godard shot Breathless<\/em> (French title: \u00c0 Bout de Souffle<\/em>) guerrilla-\u200bstyle on the streets of Paris, using real people as extras, barking instructions at his actors on the fly, changing scenes as inspiration struck him, and calling it quits for the day as soon as he ran out of ideas.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, it was the total opposite of how we\u2019re doing it!\u201d Deutch remembers Link-later telling the cast and crew. She digs frantically through the papers on her desk until she finds a manifesto the director distributed to them. \u201cGodard was going for spontaneity and immediacy,\u201d she reads aloud. One way to achieve a similar effect, Linklater wrote, is to \u201cfully examine the scene from every angle, find new elements if they are to be found, and know it so well, and be so relaxed with what we are doing, that it seems spontaneous and improvised, that the performance is without artifice.\u201d Deutch loves that Linklater managed to inject a bit of the \u201chang out\u201d vibe, perfected in early movies like Slacker<\/em> and Dazed and Confused,<\/em> into Nouvelle Vague.<\/em> \u201cThere\u2019s nothing pretentious about the movie,\u201d she says. \u201cYou want to hang out with these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the movie aims to be historically accurate, it required the occasional dose of imagination. Deutch remembered the way that Linklater sometimes took inspiration from his actors behind the scenes and reverse engineered it. Noticing a scene in the real Breathless<\/em> where Seberg\u2019s character is skipping, for example, Deutch had her version of Seberg skipping onto the movie set: \u201cI really enjoyed that part. It made me feel like a little detective.\u201d<\/p>\n

She also felt deep empathy for Seberg, who at the time of shooting Breathless<\/em> was not the outspoken political activist she would later become but a 20-year-old traumatized by her brief time in Hollywood, faced with a French enfant terrible determined to change all the rules of moviemaking. \u201cSeberg definitely had mixed feelings about Godard,\u201d Deutch says. \u201cShe acknowledged his genius, but I think she found him emotionally distant and manipulative. Later, she said something like, \u2018He wasn\u2019t interested in who I was, just in what I could represent.\u2019 That is a very powerful analysis of a young woman in a man\u2019s world.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Clothing by Emporio Armani; tie by Zegna; earrings by Swarovski; watch by Audemars Piguet. Throughout: Hair products by Oway; makeup products by Love + Craft + Beauty; manicure products by Dashing Diva.<\/p>\n

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Deutch, now 30, says she\u2019s experiencing a second wind since going through her Saturn return\u2014an astrological milestone that can mark someone\u2019s passage into adulthood. \u201cI thought it was bullshit,\u201d she says, \u201cbut I really went through it and I refell in love with my job.\u201d She recently finished a stint on Broadway as Emily in Our Town<\/em> and has two other movies out soon\u2014The Threesome<\/em> and Anniversary.<\/em> There\u2019s also a long list of projects she\u2019d like to make (a feminist werewolf movie, a family story in collaboration with her sister) and roles she\u2019d like to play (Natalie Wood, Sally Bowles in Cabaret<\/em>) as soon as she can stop and find time.<\/p>\n

\u201cI checked off a lot of boxes of things I was terrified of: I cut all my hair off, did a movie in a different language, and then had my Broadway debut,\u201d she says. \u201cThe question people ask when you\u2019re doing a play is: Don\u2019t you get bored of doing it every night? But I thought it was so healing to do it every night, because instead of going home and torturing myself over \u2018I should have done that\u2019 or \u2018Why did I do that?\u2019 you can go: Oh, I could
try that tomorrow\u2026. That was so healing for that part of myself I referenced earlier that was so, so hard on myself and so mean to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deutch furtively dabs her eyes with a tissue. \u201cThe second I start talking about doing that play, I cry because I love it,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s like a metaphor for life\u2014we\u2019re so lucky to get one more shot to show up in the way that we want to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hair, Peter Gray; makeup, Francelle Daly; manicure, Pika; tailor, Majors the Tailor; set design, Viki Rutsch. Produced on location by Very Rare Productions. For details, go to VF.com\/credits<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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