Every time Zazie Beetz steps onto a new set, it feels like the first day of school. “I’m inherently an introverted person, so going on set can be hard for me,” she says. “It takes me months to really feel comfortable. And by the time I do, it’s over.” Which is why she’s so happy to soon be back with her Atlanta castmates, after wrapping the second season three years ago.
When we connect in late February, Beetz has just received the scripts for the new season and is gearing up to read the first episode right after our conversation. “I’m really excited to be going back to shooting Atlanta because “I’m just like, I’ll be with a family,” she says. She calls it a “homecoming” for her castmates—so much has happened since they were last together. Donald Glover, the show’s creator, executive producer, and director, became the first African American to win an Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. The rest of the main cast, Brian Tyree Henry, LaKeith Stanfield, and Beetz herself, have seen their careers soar as the accolades, from multiple Golden Globe wins and nominations to critical adulation, have continued to pour in. That kind of recognition for a television series after a mere two seasons is extremely rare, particularly for a mostly Black cast and all-Black writers room. Rare, yet warranted.
In the past five years, Zazie Beetz has been called a “breakout star” and “scene-stealer,” and the spotlight on her has only continued to build. Now she is hitting her stride—feeling more creative than ever—and she has the work to prove it.
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Beetz lists a dizzying array of upcoming projects, starting with a Jay-Z–produced western called The Harder They Fall. Beetz plays Stagecoach Mary, based on the first African American woman mail carrier in the U.S. Black people are an overlooked, yet significant, part of American Wild West culture. Beetz is proud to help correct the narrative and reverse the whitewashing of history. Not to mention that the role gave her an opportunity to work with British writer and director Jeymes Samuel as well as acting heavyweights like Jonathan Majors, Delroy Lindo, Idris Elba, and Regina King.
She’s also starring alongside Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, an action thriller about five assassins whose missions are interlinked. Then there’s the forthcoming Extinct, an animated movie about adorable, fictitious animals who time-travel in order to save themselves and their species from disappearing. “I’m so excited to be working again, and I feel really grateful,” Beetz says. “It’s just been so good for me to be able to stay busy.”
I’m catching Beetz at a time when she’s rounding the corner of an emotionally exhausting year. Early in 2020, the 29-year-old actress had a job based in Santa Fe that was abruptly canceled due to COVID-19. But she’d already found a house and signed a lease, so she decided to stay until the end of last spring, returning home to New York just as the city was coming back to life. Then the murder of George Floyd happened. “It all really fell apart for me,” Beetz says. “I had a really emotional summer, and I had to sit with a lot of feelings.” There were moments of introspection as she grappled with race in America and with her own existence, which often left her feeling sad and alone.
As the daughter of a white German cabinetmaker and a Black American who works at a nonprofit, Beetz has been exploring her relation to race and identity since childhood. She was born in the Mitte district of Berlin, its centermost borough, about two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The year before she was born, her father, whom she describes as “very much a German man,” visited the United States for the first time and fell in love with Beetz’s mother. Once her mom became pregnant, they moved to Germany and got married. But they didn’t stay long—Beetz’s mother had a difficult time because she couldn’t find many others who looked like her, so they moved back to America, settling in New York City.
When Beetz visited her German grandparents every summer, “I wouldn’t see another person of color for weeks, at all, no one...not any other color,” she says. “And if you did, you would wave at each other and be like, ‘Hi. I see you.’” Nevertheless, Beetz identifies very strongly as both Black and German, and constantly assesses the differences in her experiences in Europe and the U.S. She observes how much Berlin is changing after a century of political turmoil and upheaval. Even her mother, who didn’t return to the country until 2019, is finding new ways to process the transformation. “She was like, ‘Wow! I could live here now,’ ” Beetz says.
Whether Beetz was in Berlin or Manhattan, her parents always maintained a nurturing environment. “My parents just didn’t get in my way,” she says. “They allowed me to play and to just follow what my spirit was leading me toward.” That freedom, coupled with her Gemini aura, paved the way for her to try it all. She studied French, Arabic, and Spanish; sang, painted, drew; carted around books on freestyling; designed her own clothes; and volunteered in her community.
But it was a random interaction in third grade that would set the trajectory of her life. One day, she ran into a friend leaving an audition for an after-school acting program. Beetz was intrigued and wanted to try out herself. Though the auditions were over by the time she found her way to the stage, the coordinators allowed her to give it a go anyway. She went on to win a spot in her school’s production of Annie, an experience she considers formative. From there, she was cast in roles like Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls and Marian in Music Man, before developing her craft further at Skidmore College. She calls herself a jack-of-all-trades who’s not “amazing” at anything, even if the world begs to differ.
Beetz’s professional breakthrough arrived in 2015 when she was cast as Atlanta’s Vanessa “Van” Keifer, a young mother who’s trying to figure herself out as well as her relationship with her child’s father, Earn, played by Glover. Beetz has a quiet intensity about her in the role that cuts through the bravado and hilarity of her male counterparts. At times, she is unsure of her path and her romantic future with Earn. In other scenes, she is direct—forceful, even—in recognizing her value, even if she’s alone. The performance earned her an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series.
From there, her résumé has included playing Domino in Deadpool 2; Sam in Steven Soderbergh’s High Flying Bird; Sophie in Joker; and Emma in the Sundance critic favorite Nine Days, opposite Winston Duke. Though these roles are all distinct, there is an undercurrent that ripples throughout: Beetz’s peace and optimism, which seems to radiate from the screen. She admits she doesn’t actively look for roles that fit this pattern, but she does want to play characters who are complicated, because they feel the most truthful: “I find characters who are really grappling with what is good and what is bad, what is right and what is wrong—I feel like that’s such a reflection of life to me, always reevaluating based on context and on your experience.”
Regina King, her costar in The Harder They Fall, says Beetz’s ability to honestly portray a character comes from “doing her homework” to truly learn the person. “I get the feeling that no matter the genre, Zazie wants the audience to believe in her character,” King says. “And she knows that she has to truly believe in the character first for that to happen.”
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Beetz’s choice of roles has brought her much success—and also a touch of impostor syndrome. Her rise was fast. In 2014, just one year out of college, she booked her first gig. The following year, she booked Atlanta. “I think initially I just really felt like, Have I paid my dues? Do I deserve this?” she says. Throughout her career, Beetz has been vocal about her struggles with success, including a fear of failure and of being unable to meet the expectations of her audience, casting directors, and coworkers. But her Atlanta costar Brian Tyree Henry says her talent was apparent from the jump. “Zazie has such a power and presence about herself that is so undeniable,” he says. “She has this fantastic gift of being completely rooted, but light as air at the same time. Not many can give characters the grace and willingness that she does.... There is a simplicity to her pain, her joy, her struggle that makes it so seamless to follow any journey she is on.”
And as she approaches her thirtieth birthday, Beetz is feeling much calmer. With each new project, she finds another audience and a new swath of fans, who have both encouraged and loved her work enough for her to have confidence that she can exist in the Hollywood landscape just fine as she is.
When she’s not juggling multiple movie projects, Beetz is carving out a space through her social media. She’s not on Twitter, she says, because “I know myself [too well].” (Twitter would drain her, and she doesn’t want to compound the vitriol she receives on Instagram, she says.) But looking at her Instagram, you find many posts devoted to wellness, whether it’s making one’s own kombucha or body butter. She’s very careful and curatorial when it comes to what she publicizes to the world. She has been asked to do some branding on her page, but mostly rejects such offers in order to maintain the authenticity of her own voice. “I want that space to just really be just me and not anything else, and not being told by anyone else [what to do], because this is the only public space that I have where I can do that.”
Beetz’s Instagram account is not always centered on herself. She draws attention to the climate crisis with a IGTV series called Zazie Talks Climate, in which she interviews activists, such as Mary Annaïse Heglar, a climate justice writer, and Patrick Houston, a climate and inequality campaigns associate at New York Communities for Change. Her longtime partner, David Rysdahl, came up with the idea for the series in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election as a way to diversify the climate movement. Beetz wants to use her platform to help people to understand the significance of community and why people of color will be hit the hardest by climate change—and to extend an open hand to anyone who is interested in engaging with the movement. “The climate movement can feel very white,” Beetz says. “I wanted people to see that there are so many people who look like me already doing the work.”
You’ll also find more videos and images of her with a makeup-free face—going to the dentist, gathering with loved ones—in her feed than you will high-fashion editorial spreads, because that’s her in a nutshell: down-to-earth, unfiltered, and, most of all, free. Beetz reinforces that her life on a day-to-day basis is not that glamorous. “The core of my life is, I have a pile of dishes. My cat has been vomiting all the time, and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on. My room is a mess. I have clothes from when I was in seventh grade that I still need to figure out what to do with.” But her explanation of her personal disarray makes her all the more endearing. If Beetz’s serenity and professional versatility are an indication of anything, it’s that the line between celebrity and commoner does not have to be so strict. Beetz recognizes the boundary, blurs it, and reveals how close she’s been to the rest of us all along. In that, Zazie Beetz is our community, and we are hers.
HAIR BY LACY REDWAY; MAKEUP BY TYRON MACHHAUSEN FOR CHANEL BEAUTY; PRODUCED BY WILLIAM B. GALUSHA.
This article originally appeared in the May 2021 issue.
