Zooey Deschanel: People want to dismiss me for being feminine & wearing pink
I’ve said this before and I will continue saying it because I don’t care if I’m called “uncool” by the arbiters of cool television: I watch New Girl and The Mindy Project back-to-back and I love both shows. While I think New Girl had some bad episodes last year, I’m still sticking with it because more often than not, even a bad episode still has some really funny/sweet moments. (Incidentally, The Mindy Project just kept getting better and better throughout its first season, and I have high hopes for the second season.) So, I’m a Zooey Deschanel convert – I used to find her annoying and twee, but I love her on New Girl and I’m really liking Zooey as a person, in interviews and such. She’s quirky and weird and I like the way she talks about her version of feminism and female empowerment. Here are some highlights from her new Marie Claire interview:
On crowds: “I get very overwhelmed by crowds, especially of strangers.” Her idea of heaven on earth is “being on a farm, with horses, farm animals, and dogs. Select people, some food, and maybe some music. That sounds really great.”
On people today: “My theory is that people in this day and age want to dismiss things. So they want to be able to dismiss you. They say, ‘You don’t belong, you don’t deserve this because here’s why, and let me find an intellectual argument for why you wearing pink or cuff sleeves or a bow makes you not worthy of your accomplishments. Everything you’ve done doesn’t matter because you wore the wrong thing or you speak in a way that’s feminine or you identify yourself as feminine.’ And I just think that’s bulls–t. And smart people are doing it, and that’s surprising to me. I’ll give them being smart, but they’re being very shortsighted.”
She continues: “It’s just attacking who I am. A lot of times it doesn’t have to do with what I get paid to do. It has to do with, ‘Oh, you stupid person.’ Even I get slammed and overwhelmed by how negative the Internet can get, and I’m an adult. I don’t pay any mind to it, but it’s pretty shocking how when you give people anonymity – it’s like the worst of human nature.”
On her website, HelloGiggles.com: “I just felt it’s important to teach young girls to be strong people, to not think, I can’t do this because I’m worried about what people will say. There are worse consequences, but online negativity stops people from being creative, part of which is having bad ideas as well as good ideas. When somebody says, ‘That idea’s stupid,’ you stop your flow of ideas. We can’t have the next generation be so afraid because they have been attacked.”
On her speech patterns: “I became aware that people were criticizing the way I speak, which seems weird to me. I speak the way I speak, and I am an intelligent person. Sometimes I lean into California-speak more for entertainment value. It’s not that I can’t live in a world without the word like.”
Being bullied in middle school: In an oft-told tale, one day a popular classmate actually spat in her face. “I was talking to her, and she didn’t want me to talk to her. I honestly did nothing,” Deschanel recalls. “I just remember walking over to my locker and wiping the spit off my face, so humiliated.” She recently spotted her assailant in photographs at a mutual friend’s wedding. “I’ve forgiven her,” she says now. “I just don’t forget.” Looking back, she thinks middle school helped build character. “A lot of people I knew who didn’t struggle, who maybe came from a lot of money or were really pretty—those people actually have a harder time as adults in a way. They don’t even understand what it’s like to not be pretty…I’m not saying it’s good, I don’t think people should be mean to each other, [but] I think it made me stronger.”
Deciding to do a TV show: “[I] always went into [New Girl] with the thought that it could last. I never thought about doing TV, particularly because I didn’t want to be signed up for something for that long. But after being frustrated with the kinds of material I was getting in the feature world—and it’s very competitive— I just thought, Why am I doing this in the first place? If you’re an actor and you want to go where the material is, it doesn’t matter the medium. All these people who used to say, ‘Oh, I’ll never do TV,’ now want to because they see things that are successful and good on TV.” (In 1999, when Deschanel dropped out of Northwestern University after seven months to appear in Almost Famous, someone told her she should do a sitcom because she was funny. “And I was like, ‘That’s crazy.’ I remember thinking, I want to do art films.”)
Her new seven-season contract: “I always felt like a little bit of an outsider, and now I’m an outsider who’s a satellite for the outsiders? All of a sudden, I’m on the inside, and it feels weird. Because I always saw myself as sort of not mainstream.”
She has a boyfriend but she doesn’t want to talk about him: She showed a picture of her rescue dogs and mentioned that “my boyfriend” took it. She leans over to look at my list of “her boyfriend” questions, which she wants to skip. “I will say we got the dogs together, and he loves them very much.” When the couple visited the Black Dahlia house in Los Angeles, where some believe Elizabeth Short was murdered in 1947, all of a sudden they were “house-hunting.” “We saw it just to see a Lloyd Wright house,” she says. “Just because you go see a house doesn’t mean you’re going to buy it.”
Does she want kids? “I’m not going to answer that question. I’m not mad at you for asking that question, but I’ve said it before: I don’t think people ask men those questions.”
Learning from marriage and divorce? “Learned from being married and divorced? I will say this: Whether you’re married or not, if you’re in a relationship, you have to wake up every day and say, ‘I want to stay with this person.’ You have to make the commitment every day and every second and every minute.”
I know what she’s getting at with the questions about babies, and I respect her answer – if she doesn’t want to talk about it, she shouldn’t. That was an effective way of shutting it down and I wish more celebrity women would do that. That being said, I have noticed that more and more, male celebrities ARE getting baby questions, so there. Feminism! As for Zooey and how she defends herself against people who call her stupid for wearing pink and being girly… I understand what she’s getting at. I think it’s more about how she – and other pink-wearing girly-girls – are underestimated in society because of their girlishness. It’s not so much about “intellect” it’s about “can I take this woman seriously if she’s dressed like a character from Alice in Wonderland?” But I like the way Zooey is waging that battle.
Photos courtesy of Tesh/Marie Claire.
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