Nobody Told Zoey Deutch She Was Becoming a Rom-Com Star
‘Voicemails for Isabelle’ star Zoey Deutch on her new rom-com, growing up in a Hollywood family, and why “stupid” comedies feel like home.
By Robert Brian Taylor
Zoey Deutch has officially ascended to rom-com queendom. If you didn’t already know this from her roles in streaming hits like Set It Up and Something from Tiffany’s, you’re getting a firm reminder with the release of her latest film, Voicemails for Isabelle, a Netflix tear-jerker that blends tried-and-true romantic-comedy tropes with an emotional story about losing the person you love the most.
Here’s what you also need to know: Deutch didn’t ask for this crown. She certainly didn’t plan for it. It’s debatable if she even wants it. So while you may find the chemistry between her and Glen Powell in 2018’s Set It Up strong enough to power a mid-sized city, Deutch will tell you that she didn’t even realize it was a rom-com when she signed up to do it. “That’s on me being an idiot,” she admits. “Of course, it’s a rom-com. But, at that moment in time, there was a real gap in the market for that kind of movie, so calling a movie that was not a positive thing.” Deutch likens Set It Up‘s success to a “happy accident,” before quipping, “Nothing has been a part of my master plan!”
These days, the actress is less naive about which of her movies fit into which genres, although she insists it’s not a primary concern when deciding which films to go out for or sign onto. The fact that Voicemails for Isabelle could be classified as a rom-com is certainly not why she joined the project. “I’m thinking about: What is the character? What is the story, and how do I connect to it?” Deutch muses. “Set It Up leans much more into the comedy space, whereas Voicemails is more heartfelt and, in some moments, heart-wrenching. I think it’s a delicate balance. I tend to not connect to a lot of movies of this genre, but this one was one that I have wanted to make and have loved for many years.”
It’s been seven years since Deutch first read the script for Voicemails, but she never lost her passion for its heartfelt story, a trick she learned from director Richard Linklater (much more on him in a bit). She continued pestering the film’s producers about it, and when the Sony project eventually set up shop at Netflix, she successfully booked the role. So, yes, it’s another jewel in her rom-com crown. But it also shows the lengths Deutch will go to manifest something she cares about into existence, be it a romantic comedy with a dramatic bent that hits home for her, a stint on Broadway in her favorite play, or multiple films with Linklater. She may not have a grand plan, but things are coming together for Zoey Deutch quite nicely, all the same.
Deutch Channeled Her Real-Life Sisterhood for ‘Voicemails for Isabelle’
Decked out in a comfy-looking bright red sweater and a blue Sony Pictures Classics baseball cap, Deutch is speaking with me from a New York hotel room, waiting to fly back to Los Angeles for the Voicemails for Isabelle premiere. She’s recently been camped in New Jersey while filming The 99’ers, an upcoming sports drama about the U.S. Women’s soccer team that won the 1999 World Cup.
While Deutch is happy to head back home, she’s also busy trying to fit some press in for Voicemails for Isabelle, in which she plays Jill, a beleaguered San Francisco chef, unlucky in love and at work, who is devastated when her younger sister, Isabelle (Ciara Bravo), finally dies due to complications from the cystic fibrosis she had been battling since childhood. In the aftermath, Jill spends her days both listening to saved voicemails from Isabelle and leaving new voicemails of her own on Isabelle’s still-active phone, updating her late sister on the day-to-day of her life.
The twist is that, unbeknownst to Jill, Isabelle’s cell phone number has been transferred to a new owner, a dreamy Texas real-estate agent named Wes, played by Nick Robinson. After listening to her messages, Wes finds himself drawn to Jill and eventually travels to San Francisco to meet the woman on the other end of the line. As any rom-com fan can guess, these two might be destined to be together, but there are plenty of bumps in the road on the way to a happy ending.
The film’s theme of enduring sisterhood is one of the reasons Deutch was drawn to the project in the first place. “My sister is my best friend. I love her more than anything, and [this story] really got me. It really, really got me. I was super moved by it,” she says, casually referencing her older sister Madelyn, an actress and musician. “The depth of the relationship between sisters is so intense, and the idea that I would ever have to experience any of this without her feels unimaginable. I am certain that my relationship to [Madelyn] informed the performance and the relationship that I had to my sister in the film.”
That real-life dynamic isn’t the only way Deutch relates to her Voicemails character. “I, too, have voicemails from people who are no longer here that mean a lot to me. One of my most prized possessions is a voicemail from my grandmother, who’s no longer alive. And the idea that that could ever go away would really break my heart.”
Deutch Never Considered Herself a Child Actor
Of course, the subject of family is bound to come up with Deutch. She’s the daughter of director Howard Deutch (Pretty in Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful) and 1980s “It Girl” Lea Thompson, who’s still best known for her role as Michael J. Fox‘s mom in the Back to the Future trilogy, along with ’80s teen classics like Red Dawn and All the Right Moves. From the time she was a small child, Deutch was sure she wanted to become an actor. “I don’t have a memory of not wanting to do it,” she says. “It was always what I wanted to do.”
While her parents were happy to let her take acting and improv classes as a young child, they were less than thrilled when Deutch began to express interest in following in her mother’s footsteps on a professional level. “I am certain my mother and father would have preferred a more traditional route for me of finishing high school, going to college, and then starting my life in that way,” she says, recalling battles she had with her parents at the time. “I had a lot of energy, and I had a lot of passion. And I had always been asking them: ‘I want to audition. I want to try.’ They were totally in the right to not want me to be a child actor. That is, as we all know, a dangerous path.”
I thought I was an old lady. When people say to me, ‘You were a child actor,’ I’m still like, ‘No, I wasn’t. I was 14. I was way older!’
They eventually relented — largely because, as Deutch entered her teenage years, she started rebelling against the guardrails they were trying to set up for her. “‘Acting out’ is the nice way of saying it,” she laughs. “And my mother saw an opportunity for me to channel my energy into something positive, which was starting my life in this professional way.” Having won that particular battle, Deutch started booking parts, including a recurring role on the third season of the Disney Channel teen sitcom The Suite Life on Deck in 2010. Other TV gigs followed, including regular appearances on Sarah Michelle Gellar‘s one-season CW thriller, Ringer. As Deutch headed into her late teens, she successfully crossed over into movies in YA adaptations like 2013’s Beautiful Creatures and 2014’s Vampire Academy.
To this day, Deutch jokingly rejects the notion that she was ever a child actor, something she more seriously took offense to in her younger years. “I thought I was an old lady. When people say to me, ‘You were a child actor,’ I’m still like, ‘No, I wasn’t. I was 14. I was way older!'” She is, however, happy that her parents did end up letting her kick off her career at what is still widely regarded as a pretty young age. “I’m so unbelievably grateful now, at 31, that my parents let me start at that age. Because there’s no way I would have had the chutzpah and the confidence and the ambition to start now versus then.”
Starting out young, Deutch adds, allowed her to navigate the early challenges of becoming a professional actor. “When you are beginning your career and auditioning, generally speaking, you will likely get the parts that are aligned with whatever your default behavior is when you’re nervous,” she tells me. “It doesn’t matter what your actual essence is or what you actually know you do well. Whatever you do when you are stressed, anxious, nervous — those are the parts that you will get at the beginning of your career. And that is a very weird thing to try to harness or identify or change, because that’s your nervous system. You go into blackout mode, and you react in a way that sometimes you don’t have control over, especially when you’re young. That was something that was tricky for me to identify.”
Richard Linklater Taught Deutch an Unforgettable Lesson in ‘Everybody Wants Some’
I first took notice of Deutch in Richard Linklater’s 2016 college campus-set comedy Everybody Wants Some, a bawdy but incredibly sweet tale of a bunch of college baseball players trying to figure out what kind of people they want to be while they party and try to get laid (often successfully) in 1980 Texas. Deutch plays Beverly, a performing-arts major who hooks up with one of the ballplayers and invites the whole group to a theater party that’s one of the film’s big comedy setpieces. Her role in the movie is not a large one, but the actress leaves a strong impression. She’s not the only one who made their mark in Everybody Wants Some; the movie also stars Tyler Hoechlin, Wyatt Russell, and Deutch’s future co-star Glen Powell before anyone knew who these guys were.
Now, the actress says, she has “two very distinct memories” from filming that comedy. One involves Linklater “trying to map out Merrily [We Roll Along] on the back of his lunch plate,” while the other would lead to one of the turning points in her career. “He very casually, in passing, said, ‘You know, I am making a movie about the making of Breathless. Have you seen it?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And I’m scared because I’m a teenager, and I’m in my dream movie with my dream director. I’m like, oh my god, is this a test? And he’s like, ‘I want you to play this actress, Jean Seberg, in it.’ I looked her up, and I’m like, ‘Is he crazy? I look nothing like her, but okay, sure, absolutely.'” Despite the lack of physical resemblance, Deutch reveals now that her reaction stemmed from much more pressing worry. “I thought I was going to be cut out of Everybody Wants Some. I just kept reading the script, and I was like, ‘Well, the movie still works if my character’s out of it. And I don’t know if Rick likes me, and I don’t know if I’m getting it.’ I was so spirally and in my head about my performance in that movie, and when he said that, I remember just utter relief that maybe I wasn’t going to be cut out of Everybody Wants Some.”
In addition to not being cut from the film, Deutch did indeed go on to star as Seberg in Nouvelle Vague, Linklater’s 2025 film about Jean-Luc Godard and the birth of the French New Wave. Despite having to learn to speak French for the film, she is sensational in it — scoring an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Performance — and Deutch says that working with Linklater has had a profound effect on her career. “I’ve learned an immense amount from him and feel very grateful that we have this ongoing collaboration. I love him so much as a human being. I’m so inspired by him as a person, as an artist, as a friend.”
She’s also taken a page from how Linklater lines up his own films. “He always has six or seven things that he’s writing and working on and watering,” she explains. “He’s watering all these different plants, and he sees what’s going to grow.” In an industry where things just naturally take time, collaborating with Linklater doubled as a reminder for her not to give up on the projects that are most important to her. “From my perspective, it’s a more spiritual approach — things happen when they’re supposed to happen.”
It’s this mantra that Deutch now applies to her own career, and it’s why she stuck with Voicemails for Isabelle for the last seven years, even when the role of Jill was offered to other actresses. “It’s part of why I have this list of movies [I want to make] that I love so much. Even if they don’t want me now, maybe in a couple of years, they’ll be interested in me. Or there are tons of movies on there that have been hard to get financing for, and when I’m in meetings, I just bring them up.”
Linklater isn’t the only person she formed a tight relationship with on the set of Everybody Wants Some. There’s also Powell, whose star power was apparent from day one, and whose praises Deutch doesn’t hesitate to sing. “We were at the 10-year anniversary in Austin a couple of months ago. We watched the movie, and it is just so obvious what a star he is. It’s so undeniable. He has that presence and charm and charisma in person. We immediately connected and became friends, but I’m not special in that regard. There’s not a human being who doesn’t meet Glen and is like, ‘I think we’re best friends,’ because he’s so engaging. He’s one of my favorite people in the world.”
Two years after Everybody Wants Some, Deutch and Powell would team up again for Set It Up, her most celebrated rom-com role to date. Deutch is well aware of the movie’s fanbase, which is only one of the reasons she’s desperate to reteam with Powell and Set It Up‘s writer, Katie Silberman, for Most Dangerous Game, a new rom-com that Netflix first announced in 2019 but has had trouble getting out of the starting gate. “That’s a shame because that movie is, by far, one of the best scripts I’ve ever read,” she says, bemoaning its in-limbo status. “That’s one of the movies that’s on my list: I’ve got to make this movie. It is an A++++++ script.” Like her willingness to wait for Voicemails for Isabelle, Deutch remains persistent. “I will make that movie. I would love to make it with Netflix, and I would love to make it with Glen and Katie.”
How Deutch Manifested Her Debut on Broadway
Talking to Deutch, it’s easy to believe that she’ll eventually turn Most Dangerous Game from a script into a reality. All you need to do is look at what she’s willed into existence over the last handful of years. After her admittedly small role was cut out of The Amazing Spider-Man back in 2012, she joined her first movie franchise in 2019 with Zombieland: Double Tap, the sequel to the horror-comedy smash, and practically ran away with the film by playing a ditzy Valley Girl who proves to be surprisingly adept at surviving the zombie apocalypse.
“It was maybe the most fun I’ve ever had on set,” Deutch says, adding that she was in “actor heaven” getting to share scenes with Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, and Emma Stone. While her character in that movie initially seems vastly different from both the parts she typically plays and her real-life self, she points out that it’s not as far away as one might think: “I did grow up in the [San Fernando] Valley. I was accustomed to the Valley accent. The vocal fry and the ‘likes’ and the ‘totallys’ — they exist deep within my soul.”
It felt like when you watch a movie, and there’s an actress who gets a part, and they start sobbing in their house — that was me.
Around the same time, Deutch began attaching herself to smaller films she wanted to make as a producer (Buffaloed, Not Okay, The Threesome), and she eventually started landing some higher-profile auteur projects, including the aforementioned Nouvelle Vague and Clint Eastwood‘s legal thriller Juror #2. In 2024, she made her Broadway debut as Emily Webb in Thornton Wilder‘s play Our Town, alongside Jim Parsons and Katie Holmes. According to Deutch, the entire experience was a dream come true, and it’s really best to just let her tell the story:
“It was one of the most bizarre fucking insane manifesting stories of my life. I, of course, have wanted to do Broadway. Who doesn’t want to do Broadway? I’ve auditioned for a lot of shows before, but it just wasn’t the right fit. Our Town is my favorite American play, and I have it on my bedside table at home. I read it frequently, and I called my theater agent. I said, ‘I just want to let you know — because I feel like there could be value in this — that my favorite American play is Our Town. I know they haven’t done it on Broadway in 19 years, but if they ever do it again, can you please let me know? Can you please try to get me an audition?’
“There was silence, and then he said, ‘That’s so weird, because I just had a meeting with my client, and they’re going to do it at the Barrymore next year.’ I said, ‘Please, whatever you do, get me a meeting, get me an audition. I will drop everything. I will pay for my apartment.’ I was just like, please, please, please. It was like a weird psychic moment, so it was definitely meant to be. I’ve never felt as excited and as emotional getting a part. It felt like when you watch a movie, and there’s an actress who gets a part, and they start sobbing in their house — that was me. It was incredibly special, and the whole run changed my life.”
Deutch Knows You’re Having a Tough Time Placing Her
Deutch and I spent some time during our conversation trying to figure out which film should qualify as her breakthrough, and it’s not an easy task. When someone stops her on the street to ask her for a selfie, she usually has to quiz them about what they know her from. “Because it’s always different,” she explains. “Or when people say to me, ‘Who are you? What have you been in?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know!’ I’m not trying to be difficult; I truly don’t know. I always go, ‘You can look me up. My name is Zoey Deutch. I have no idea what you know me from.'”
What’s interesting is that Deutch doesn’t necessarily consider this a problem. When I point out that the trajectory of her career has been very different from that of her mom, who blew up thanks to Back to the Future, she says she’s better off for it. “I have such a sensitivity to any young actress I see who is shot out of a cannon and has all these eyeballs on them,” she admits. “I have this deep empathy for people who have had that experience. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve just heard stories from my mother, or if it’s just knowing there’s no way I would have been equipped to handle it, even though I’m surrounded by people to support me and guide me in a way that most of these people don’t have.”
While Deutch may not have a single film she can point to as her defining role, she can identify when it felt like she had a personal breakthrough, and it happened just recently — right before she started shooting Juror #2 and Nouvelle Vague, before doing Our Town. “I took a year of figuring my life and self and all of that stuff out. Everything after that, I just felt different. I felt like I had a much better relationship to myself and to my work, and it felt like the beginning of my career again. It’s been really lovely. I just feel rejuvenated. I feel really inspired. I feel more grounded.”
It’s not like I’m saying I have to, but I just enjoy the experience of working with female directors so much.
It’s this newfound peace that has her stoked about Voicemails for Isabelle. It’s not just her personal connections to the story, or the fact that she got Netflix to pay for some baking lessons, but also the people she got to work with. She was thrilled to finally share the screen with Nick Robinson, whom she’s known since high school. “I think having a really strong built-in friendship really lends in a positive direction towards having what they call chemistry. Because [Nick and I] have a history, we have a friendship, we have a shorthand, and I think it really makes such a big difference.”
She shares screentime with another Nick in Voicemails, too; Nick Offerman plays Jill’s boss, an executive chef who takes pleasure in making her life hell but made it difficult for Deutch to get through scenes for a completely different reason: “He made me laugh so hard.” She also relays a funny anecdote about shooting a sex scene with Lukas Gage, which is, shall we say, the complete opposite of steamy. “With that scene, there were two challenges: One, trying not to laugh because I thought Lukas was so hilarious. Two, the night before we filmed the scene, I was wearing a dress with some tape, and when we took off the dress, the tape ripped my skin off. I had a giant wound on my chest; it was really gross. We didn’t know what to do. So it was a lot of technical figuring out how we would shoot the scene without seeing a giant ripped flesh wound on my chest.”
Deutch speaks highly of Voicemails for Isabelle‘s writer and director, Leah McKendrick, the latest in a series of women filmmakers that Deutch has aligned herself with. “She’s such a powerhouse and a triple threat. She wrote, directed, and acted in the movie, and I just think she did such a beautiful job of bringing these characters to life in a way that will captivate both fans of rom-coms and dramas alike.” Set It Up was also both written and directed by women, and The 99’ers has a female director calling the shots, too. This isn’t necessarily an accident, as Deutch adds that working with female filmmakers continues to be something that is massively important to her. “In my early to mid-20s, I was very intentional about wanting to work with female directors. At this point, I just love working with them. It’s not like I’m saying I have to, but I just enjoy the experience of working with female directors so much.”
The Joy of Making “Stupid” (but Brilliant) Movies
When I ask Deutch what her favorite rom-com of all time is, she thinks for a moment before pointing the question back at me. I answer Rob Reiner‘s When Harry Met Sally…, which she agrees is a perfect movie. She says she’d probably go with The Apartment, the 1960 Billy Wilder movie starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, the latter of whom Deutch calls an “absolute genius.” Still, that movie is over 65 years old, and you get the sense that while Deutch has been making a name for herself as modern-day rom-com royalty, it’s maybe not the genre she is most excited to personally watch.
This becomes even more apparent when we discuss the other two movies she has coming out this summer: David Wain‘s Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, and the animated Minions & Monsters. An obsessive fan of animation, Deutch was delighted to join her favorite animated franchise in a small role: “I have a lot of weird voices and a lot of weird characters, and it’s fun to explore those.”
However, it’s while talking about Gail Daughtry, where she plays a jilted woman on a mission to have sex with her celebrity crush, Jon Hamm, that she truly lights up. “I’m so grateful for the opportunity, as a result of Nouvelle Vogue and these other movies, to get immersed in the cinephile world,” Deutch says, before arriving at the truth of the situation. “But, at my core, my humble beginnings of not being a cinephile, my favorite movies in the world were these big, silly comedies. Anchorman and Zoolander are probably in my top three most-watched movies of all time, and Gail Daughtry is just the kind of movie that I like to watch. I love these silly comedies. I think David Wain is an absolute auteur, a total genius weirdo, and it requires someone really brilliant to make fun of and create such insane, absurd stupidity. I am so proud of the movie and what he did.”
So, yes, Deutch is an accidental rom-com queen, which she ultimately seems okay with — but she also wants to do silly voices, get back on Broadway as soon as possible, and work with like-minded auteur weirdos. The best part is that she doesn’t have to pick one over the others. As she once learned from Linklater, she can just keep watering the plants to see what grows.
Photography: Andrew Lipovsky | Hair: Renato Campora | Makeup: Carolina Dali at The Wall Group | Styling: Emma Jade Morrison