Zooey Deschanel
New Girl, the Fox sitcom that ran from 2011 to 2018, placed Zooey Deschanel at the center of American television comedy for the better part of a decade. She played Jessica Day across the series' seven seasons and received nominations for a Primetime Emmy Award and three Golden Globe Awards for the role, along with a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Actress in a Comedy Series.
Deschanel was born on January 17, 1980, in Los Angeles. She attended the Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences and the French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts before studying at Northwestern University. Her screen career began with a film debut in Mumford in 1999, followed quickly by a supporting role in Almost Famous in 2000. Through the early 2000s she accumulated credits across a range of films — Manic, The Good Girl, The New Guy, Elf, and All the Real Girls among them — working steadily as a film actor while also developing her work as a singer-songwriter. Her musical output draws on pop, alternative, and independent genres, and she has recorded as a recording artist in addition to her screen career. She also appeared in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Winter Passing in 2005, Bridge to Terabithia in 2007, The Happening in 2008, and 500 Days of Summer in 2009, the last of which brought her an award from the Mar del Plata Film Festival.
Beyond acting, Deschanel has worked as a film producer, television producer, and television director, and has provided voice acting in addition to her on-screen performances. She also works as a model and fashion model, activities that run alongside rather than replace her other professional roles.
Her television work continued after New Girl concluded in 2018, and she has appeared in further films including Our Idiot Brother in 2011 and The Driftless Area in 2015. The Critics' Choice Television Award she received for New Girl remains among the concrete recognitions attached to her name.
Quotes by Zooey Deschanel
I still have in me the same awareness when I was 12 and chubby and a girl was spitting in my face. I'm the same person.
If people just want to be famous, that's just not enough to get you up at 4 in the morning to go to work. You have to love what you're doing.
I like acting with no lines because all of a sudden you're able to express things without always worrying about the text. It's great to have a great text, but there's a lot of stuff you can't say in words, and I think there's something really nice about good physical moments.
I think I'm a fun flatmate. I'm always cheerful. I go on tour with my band so it's 12 people on one bus and I feel like I'm the one who's happy in the morning. I'm not a chaotic person, but I might slack off on doing the dishes from time to time.
Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything.
I get embarrassed a lot of times getting attention, but I like being onstage. Do you know what I mean? If I'm in a crowd of people and they're all looking at me, I will feel embarrassed. It's a strange dichotomy.
I put myself out there; it's part of my job, and I get it: people will attack me. At first I was thrown off, but now I have a pretty thick skin about it.
I feel there are tone singers, and there are more vocal gymnastics singers. And I think that's amazing when people can do that, but I think there's room for the tone singers. And there aren't a lot of them.
I played a lot of sarcastic, wisecracking characters for a long time, and people would think that was me. And it's very much not me, and then people would think I was being sarcastic when I wasn't: 'Oh, you're making fun of me right now.' And I wasn't!