Zoe Kazan

Zoe Kazan is an American actor, playwright, and screenwriter whose work often combines emotional realism with unusual premises. Born in Los Angeles on September 9, 1983, she is the daughter of screenwriter Nicholas Kazan and screenwriter-director Robin Swicord. She studied theater at Yale University and graduated in 2005.

Kazan began building her stage career shortly after college. Her play “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” was produced in New York in 2006, and her original drama “Trudy and Max in Love” followed that year. She later wrote “We Live Here,” which opened at Manhattan Theatre Club in 2011, and “After the Blast,” a speculative drama about parenthood and survival that premiered at Lincoln Center Theater in 2017.

As an actor, Kazan appeared in the 2007 film “The Savages,” directed by Tamara Jenkins, and had supporting roles in “Revolutionary Road” and “It’s Complicated.” Her first major starring role came in Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 western “Meek’s Cutoff,” in which she played Millie Gately, a settler traveling across the Oregon desert. She also performed on Broadway in “A Behanding in Spokane” in 2010, opposite Christopher Walken, Sam Rockwell, and Anthony Mackie.

Kazan wrote and starred in “Ruby Sparks” (2012), playing a novelist whose fictional creation mysteriously comes to life. The film, directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, explores authorship, control, and romantic idealization rather than presenting its fantasy premise as a simple love story. She subsequently appeared in “What If,” “The F Word,” and “The Big Sick,” where she played Emily Gardner opposite Kumail Nanjiani. In the Coen brothers’ anthology film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” (2018), she portrayed Alice Longabaugh in the segment “The Gal Who Got Rattled.”

Kazan and her partner, actor Paul Dano, co-wrote the screenplay for “Wildlife” (2018), Dano’s directorial debut. Adapted from Richard Ford’s novel, it follows a Montana family destabilized after the father leaves to fight a forest fire. Kazan later played Elizabeth “Bess” Levin in HBO’s “The Plot Against America” (2020), based on Philip Roth’s alternate-history novel. She also appeared in Netflix’s thriller series “Clickbait” (2021). Her career is notable for moving between stage writing, independent cinema, studio films, television drama, and screenwriting without being confined to one medium.