When Zazie Beetz is lost in thought, she tends to reach for her impossibly curly, Pantene-commercial-ready hair. She does it again and again while we dine al fresco at Peacefood, a vegan café, on a crisp, sunny day on the Upper West Side of New York. It’s a simple yet disarming quirk for a movie and television star, one that suggests that she’s deeply considering what she’s about to say next. “I’m often cast as this grounded, earthen person,” she says, hair in hand. “I guess that’s just how people see me.” It’s easy to understand why when sitting across from her or watching her on Atlanta, currently airing its fourth and final season on FX.

As Van, the ex-girlfriend of Donald Glover’s aspiring music manager, Earn, and main caretaker of their young daughter, Lottie, she keeps Atlanta—prone to jaunts both darkly absurd and Afro-surrealist—tethered to earth, holding both her TV family together and keeping the show grounded enough for viewers to buy into its unconventional, hilarious, and sometimes transgressive twists. In last night’s episode, “Work Ethic!,” Beetz takes center stage and goes toe to toe with a Tyler Perry–esque mega-producer who has taken a shine to precocious Lottie, all the while displaying that salt-of-the-earth quality that has made her an indelible part of Atlanta’s central foursome alongside Glover, Brian Tyree Henry’s rapper Paper Boi, and LaKeith Stanfield’s lovable weirdo Darius since Atlanta premiered in 2016.

Just don’t tell her that. “What is my actual expertise in anything?” she asks self-deprecatingly between bites of her pumpkin quiche. “It’s not comedy, certainly. And it’s not action. I’ve always felt this way—like I’m a jack of all trades, master of none. Maybe that’s very Gemini. I feel like I have my hands in a thousand things, but I’m not great at it.”

If that’s true, then she’s done an incredible job of fooling us all. In the four-year hiatus between Atlanta’s second and third seasons, Beetz, 31, established herself in Hollywood as one of the more versatile actors of her generation, refusing to be categorized by genre or type. You’re as likely to find her starring opposite Oscar winners like Joaquin Phoenix in dark character studies like Joker (2019) as you are to see her slinging guns alongside Regina King in the Black Spaghetti Western The Harder They Fall (2021). She’s traded barbs with Ryan Reynolds as Domino in Deadpool 2 (2018) and tried to assassinate Brad Pitt’s anxious hitman Ladybug in the action comedy Bullet Train (2022). Right when you think she’ll zig, she zags.

“I really don’t want to just be seen as one thing,” she says. “If I keep acting until I’m 80, I don’t get stuck in a certain thing. As my own mental place shifts, as my life changes—that I’m not then stuck in one identity.”

Holding multiple identities is something of a birthright for Beetz, who was born in Berlin to a Black American mother and a white German father from East Germany. She tells me how her parents met: “After the wall came down, my dad came to the US on a summer program, and my mom was there. They met and fell in love and very quickly decided to have a child. They went back to Germany, got married, and then had me there.” The family eventually moved to her mother’s native New York, where Beetz would end up splitting time between Washington Heights—181st Street to be specific—and Harlem after her parents divorced. There’s one identity where she is decidedly not split: “I am New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York. New York,” she says with gusto. “No offense to LA. I’m not the LA girl.” Why? “The sun in LA is aggro. It’s too much. It drains. If I’m there for months, I just feel like I’m going insane.”

There’s also a career-driven explanation for her preference for NYC. “It does feel like in LA everybody is industry—it does feel a little monotonous, I guess.” Beetz is the polar opposite of a nepo baby, the internet’s term du jour for the progeny of famous parents. “Nobody in my family’s in the arts,” says Beetz, who discovered her passion to entertain the normie way. “I was seven and did an elementary school play,” Beetz told me. “I had a great drama teacher, Dayna Beegun. She definitely shaped my love for theater. My parents were working, so I did after-school. After-school was like, ‘Do the play.’ That was really where my love for performing was born. I often think of my elementary school years onstage. I feel like I’m still trying to replicate that feeling.”

She followed that passion to study theater at LaGuardia High School in New York, which has churned out stars as wide-ranging as Timothée Chalamet and Nicki Minaj and was the inspiration for Fame. “I really want to drive home that it’s a public school,” she says of her time there. “[It’s] all kinds of kids with all kinds of backgrounds who are all over the city. It’s diverse. To me, it didn’t feel like an elite place.” Despite studying drama as a teen—or perhaps because she did—Beetz went off to liberal arts bastion Skidmore for college instead of drama school. “I didn’t audition for any conservatory,” she says. “I loved acting. But I felt like I had been doing this for so long. Am I just continuing because of something I feel I know best? Something I was comfortable in?” So here comes that zig: She majored in French and studied abroad for a year.

It was after college, during an unpaid internship at a casting agency, that Beetz booked Atlanta. Despite crafting an impressive acting career in the years since, Beetz doesn’t necessarily feel beholden to Hollywood. “It’s weird to say this, but I have plan B’s,” she tells me. “I’m really interested in birth, very interested. I’ve looked into midwifery school. I find it to be fascinating—that whole process of transition and pregnancy or choosing not to be pregnant.” We chat for a bit about the critical moment our nation faces regarding birth and the right to not give birth. “I know somebody who is an abortion doula and helps people who are pregnant come to their decisions,” she says. “Talks them through it, guides them through it, is there with them before and after abortions, during. That’s so powerful as well.”

Perhaps it’s this fascination with conception, this awareness that life, whenever it begins, continues long after the camera stops rolling that made Beetz such a natural fit for the maternal Van on Atlanta. Ironically, one of Beetz’s most cherished moments on Atlanta came when she played against her groundedness in the season three finale “Tarrare,” which saw Van live out a Parisian fantasy, complete with an Amelie-inspired wig. In the episode, Beetz got to demonstrate her range as an actress—comically swinging for the fences in one moment while seducing Alexander Skarsgård, and then in the next, emotionally breaking down thinking about her daughter. It’s a bold episode with an even bolder turn that required Beetz to give it everything she’s got.

“I feel proud of ‘Tarrare,’” Beetz tells me. “I felt like, alright, I’m just going to go for it. I really might straight up eat shit in this episode, but I’m just going to jump and fly or fall…. I’m less rooted in fear than I used to be. I’m finally coming into a place where I just want to explore and have a good time.”

She used to torture herself if she had a bad take, she says. Now, in part to keep from spiraling, she tries to remain blissfully ignorant of the public’s reception of the show or her work. “I’m not on Twitter…. I don’t like googling myself. It’s just too much—whether it’s positive or negative. I generally try to avoid all that.” And yet, Beetz wrestles with the constant pressure to be seen, especially in her chosen profession. “Of course you want to be relevant. It affects your career and it affects your quote, unquote ‘possibility’ or something,” she says. “It’s very hard to not compare yourself, especially when you have five people that you always come up in the same conversations [with] for stuff. You’re like, ‘What do I have or not have, that they have or don’t have?’ It’s hard to not feel like, oh, I’m lacking here, I’m lacking there.”

But she’s learning to let that go. “I really don’t want to feel beholden to other people’s expectations,” she says. “I keep trying to come back to what is just healthy for me.” Part of that is finally trusting her instincts as an actress, which she credits to the environment that Atlanta fostered over time. “I don’t think I could have done ‘Tarrare’ season one,” she says. “I didn’t have that same security in terms of my relationships with everybody and the trust that happens after time spent.”

But now that time is over. While the world is just now getting ready to bid farewell to Atlanta, Beetz has already said goodbye, having wrapped filming on the series over a year ago. “The majority of my life right now is really occupied with other stuff,” she says.

The other stuff includes starring in Steven Soderbergh’s secretive new limited series, Full Circle, with Claire Danes, Dennis Quaid, and Jharrel Jerome for HBO Max. Knee-deep in her next project, Beetz is already somewhat nostalgic for her Atlanta days. “I do think there’s a sacred bond in a way of having done something that all collectively changed our lives,” Beetz says. “Whether or not you’re best friends, calling each other every night…. We all went through this great transition together and that will forever be our connecting tissue.”

Beetz tugs at her hair again as she contemplates what life after Atlanta might look like. “I really want to write my own script. Really give birth to my own story,” she says. She’s already written a script with her fiancé, actor David Rysdahl. She name-checks Zendaya as someone who’s doing it all, an inspiration. “She’s doing music, she does fashion, she’s now producing,” Beetz says. “I saw an interview once where she talked about how you can do everything you want, in a way.” For someone who loves to zig and zag, that freedom is alluring to Beetz.

“I got really into writing after I read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut because that book is unlike any book,” she says. “I remember reading it, being fascinated and thinking, I can write whatever I want. I can do whatever I want,” she says with a smile. “There is no formula.”