Meet Zoe Kazan: one half of Hollywood's new-gen power couple

Zoe Kazan is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter and an actor familiar to British audiences for indie hits such as The Big Sick and Ruby Sparks. Despite this, I almost miss the slight, dark figure who slips past me in the lobby of the Corinthia Hotel.

Kazan is tiny and looks younger than her 35 years, which is one of the reasons she is vocal about correcting journalists’ preconceptions on Twitter. ‘I felt like being youthful looking and being diminutive and having big eyes made people sitting across from me make assumptions about who I was that were not true,’ she says. ‘I didn’t like feeling underestimated.’

She is extraordinarily focused. We spend quite some time discussing her role in the new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Wildlife, the film co-written with and directed by her long-term partner, actor Paul Dano, before she reveals that she and Dano have also just had their first child. Their six-week-old daughter, Alma, is upstairs sleeping. Back home, her parents flew from LA to Brooklyn to help out but, for this trip, London friends (their circle includes Eddie Redmayne) have helped them arrange emergency childcare.

‘It’s a really weird time, it’s very, very strange,’ Kazan says, widening her eyes. ‘Any piece of this fall would feel like a red letter day, but altogether it’s a little overwhelming. Everything looks different on the other side of having a child. It’s terrifying. We’re only six weeks in so we are trying to learn a lot about this person and what they need, and how to do the really simple things that seasoned parents know how to do. We both [planned to] put aside this time not to work so we could be with our baby, but at four weeks I was doing fittings for press events.’

That’s showbiz: you wait ages to do an exciting film and then two come out in the UK a month after you’ve had a baby. We turn first to Buster Scruggs, an anthology of brutally comic Western stories in which Kazan plays Alice Longabaugh, a solemn girl riding a wagon train towards an uncertain future in Oregon.

‘When the email came from my agent I didn’t have to read past “the Coen Brothers” before saying, “I’ll be wherever they want me to be, whenever they want me”,’ she says. ‘To work with them was a complete dream. Reading the script I had an uncanny feeling that doesn’t come often — “Oh, this could be my part.” I felt so anxious going into the callback [after the first audition], I felt like I was going to die.’ On the day, she found herself acting alongside actor Bill Heck, with whom she’d co-starred for six months in Angels in America on Broadway, and both of them were duly cast.

The film depicts a wry but bloody world of murderous singing outlaws and ‘Injun’ war parties, sideshow freaks and bank robbers, but although there are few women in it, Kazan describes the set as ‘one of the most gender neutral places I’ve ever been in my life’. The brothers were humorous, quiet presences behind the camera, with a shorthand that comes from working with the same crew for 30 years.

Wildlife is, arguably, even more of a labour of love. She and Dano — who acted Daniel Day-Lewis off the screen in There Will be Blood, and more recently played Pierre in the BBC’s War & Peace — got together while they were performing in an off-Broadway play in 2007. They’ve since co-starred in Meek’s Cutoff and Ruby Sparks — about a writer whose fictional romantic ideal comes to life — for which Kazan wrote the script.

‘We’ve acted together three times,’ she says. ‘I don’t think we’ll do that again. It’s very hard because you’re spending all day together on set, and then you’re going home together. There’s no other person in the relationship making sure that there’s food in the fridge and toilet paper.’ Dano had wanted to direct for a long time, and wrote a screenplay based on Richard Ford’s book, Wildlife, about a son observing his parents’ marriage failing in 1960. He asked Kazan to read it ‘and I kept saying, “This is not a script,” and we started to argue over it, and finally I said, “I think it would be simpler if I just rewrite this,” and he agreed’.

They batted the script back and forth. He caught the spirit of the book, she did the structure: ‘I like to put things in order, I’m a systems kind of person. Our spices at home are beautifully alphabetised.’ There seems to be no element of competitiveness in their relationship. ‘I actually can’t imagine being jealous of him or him being jealous of me,’ says Kazan. ‘His happiness means so much to me. I think it’s easier for me to be proud of him than it is for me to be proud of myself and vice versa.’

The film, which stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, is an accomplished, quietly moving work. It’s also, like two of Kazan’s plays, about an unhappy family. But it seems any conjecture that they are autobiographical works is another journalistic assumption. ‘I honestly think I had one of the happiest childhoods you could ever ask for,’ she says. ‘No life is without its challenges, but mine weren’t because of my parents.’