“One of the interesting gifts of learning the producorial side is it’s just made me a better performer,” says Zoey Deutch, the popular young actress-producer, on the latest episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast. Deutch, 25, is best known as one-half of the young couple at the center of Claire Scanlon‘s 2018 Netflix romantic comedy Set It Up, which helped to revive the genre and make her the face of the ‘Netflix and chill’ era; the other is Glen Powell, with whom she will reunite in another Katie Silberman-scripted rom-com, The Most Dangerous Game, in 2021. The native Angeleno first tried her hand at producing with The Year of Spectacular Men, a low-budget 2018 indie written by and starring her older sister, Maddie Deutch, and directed by their mother, Lea Thompson (best known for starring in 1985’s Back to the Future); she plays a supporting role in the film.
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Deutch followed that by championing, from start to finish, another microbudget film, Tanya Wexler‘s Buffaloed, “a female Wolf of Wall Street” in which she plays a young woman willing to do anything to rise above her humble circumstances and get out of upstate New York. “I just loved the part,” Deutch says. The film, which she is proud to note was named a New York Times ‘Critic’s Pick,’ premiered at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and was released in select theaters on Feb. 14.
Over the past year, the actress also took on a key supporting role opposite Tony winner Ryan Murphy‘s first project under his mega-deal with Netflix. Deutch’s parts in Buffaloed and The Politician are both “larger than life characters with weird voices and outfits,” she observes with a chuckle.
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LISTEN: You can hear the entire interview below.