Zoey Takes HER SHOT

Zoey Deutch's turn as Jean Seberg was a decade in the making. It's helped give her acting life a second wind.

- Joy Press

ABOUT 10 YEARS AGO, just as Zoey Deutch's film career was beginning to take off, Richard Linklater casually mentioned that he wanted to cast her as Jean Seberg. The director was considering a movie about the making of Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard's first contribution to the French New Wave crusade to radically reinvent film. Deutch was intrigued. What cinephile doesn't have an image of Seberg, with cropped pixie hair and a New York Herald Tribune T-shirt, seared into their memory?

“I totally fell in love with her,” Deutch says of Seberg, whom she went on to play in Linklater’s long-incubating Nouvelle Vague, which will be released this fall. “She was very mysterious, which I feel is the opposite of me—I’m the least mysterious person, and I worried about how to tap into that.” But Linklater’s decision to shoot in black and white in Paris with a French cast and crew gave Deutch a tangible connection to her role: “Seberg was learning French while acting in Breathless and said she felt very insecure. That really helped me, because I was also insecure about my French.”

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, directed by Otto Preminger, who became her sadistic Svengali. She was burned while shooting the movie’s climactic scene and then emotionally scorched when the critics and public tore her fledgling performance to shreds. After Breathless, Seberg would come to symbolize the young, liberated American woman at the dawn of the '60s.

Deutch grew up in Los Angeles. Her mom is Back to the Future star Lea Thompson; her dad is