Zooey Deschanel covers Marie Claire May 2012, discussing being child-free and her rough time as a “chubby” pre-teen.
First, the shoot. It’s below, in part, and it’s what you’d expect. It’s on-type, it’s on the nose, and it’s expected. Deschanel always looks cute, but she always looks the same too. It feeling lazy, perfunctory, way past shticky. She’s happy in her shtick, but it could devolve into a rut and incorrigible typecasting if she’s not careful. Meh. Maybe that’s what she wants, since she’s effectively playing herself anyway.
The interview’s interesting, because the 32-year-old discusses how it’s her prerogative not to have children. It’s just not important enough to arbitrarily change or give up her life and she’s okay with her choice. Later in the interview, she explains away some of her personality ticks by saying she was a heavy pre-teen and she was treated better when she lost weight. It’s a long interview, although not quite profile-long, but worth the read.
On how she’s still bad at interviews: “I don’t do well with direct questions,” she admits. Deschanel tends to think out loud, talking in rough drafts, starting a sentence, then stopping, then starting another one, crumpling that one up, too. Deep down, Deschanel seems to know exactly what she wants to say; it just takes her several tries. She’s that way with most things. “I’m a person who gets better with practice,’ she says. ‘Getting older is awesome, because you get more practice.”
On her New Girl fame: “It’s harder to do normal things,” she says. “I think that if you haven’t been to the grocery store in a really long time, it’s really easy to get very out of touch.”
On the backlash to her shtick: “People do think I’m weird,” she says. “I don’t know why.”
On fulfilling her aspirations: “I always knew there was nothing else I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to sing, perform, act.”
On her former weight: At 12 she was “chubby,” which made her a target of bullies. “I was ridiculed,” she says. The low point came when a mean girl spit in her face. “I really don’t know why she spit at me,” Deschanel says. “I just talked to her. I guess I wasn’t allowed to talk to her. I remember I couldn’t believe it.” The moment was searing, scarring, but ultimately transformative. It inspired Deschanel to reimagine herself, and over the next year, she carefully, painstakingly recast her persona, becoming more open, more emphatic, less “stubborn.” She lost 30 pounds. “All of a sudden,” she says, “everybody treated me differently.” She says of the bullies, “I don’t even know where they are now.”
On whether she’s dating, post-divorce: “Honestly, I’m just going through a divorce, so I don’t really think that’s something I want to get into now. I don’t have time to date. I literally don’t have time.”
On not wanting kids: “That’s never been my focus… My sister [Emily Deschanel] was always very motherly, babysitting and stuff. I like kids, and I like being around kids, but it was never an ambition, something, like, I need… I like working. That’s what I like doing. I like to work.” – via Marie Claire Magazine.
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