With ‘She Said’, Zoe Kazan Got Comfortable Being Nosy

Zoe Kazan is at a particularly busy point in her life when we hop on to chat for Little Gold Men in mid November. Her latest film, She Said, in which she plays the New York Times reporter who helped break the Harvey Weinstein story, is just about to hit theaters. She’s spent the past couple of years adapting East of Eden into a new limited series. Her longtime partner, Paul Dano, is also on the awards-campaign trail for his supporting turn in The Fabelmans. And let’s not forget the biggest news of all: Along with parenting their four-year-old daughter, Kazan also gave birth to a son just four weeks ago. “It is a lot at once,” she tells Little Gold Men. “We did not plan this timing, but sometimes things just happen.”

In She Said, Kazan plays Jodi Kantor, the reporter who teamed with Megan Twohey (played by Kazan’s longtime friend Carey Mulligan) to publish the sexual assault allegations against Weinstein that led to his downfall. “Even though I have friends who are journalists, I had a sort of naive vision that as soon as an investigative journalist had the truth, they could publish it,” says Kazan, who met with Kantor to study her mannerism and reporting style. “And the amount of verification and evidence that they needed in order to be able to publish this in the Times—to meet the journalistic standards of the Times—it blew my mind.”

The film also adds another level of storytelling to Kantor and Twohey’s book by revealing the personal challenges each faced as working mothers. As she explains in this week’s episode of Little Gold Men (listen to the full episode below), Kazan couldn’t help but notice the parallels between Kantor’s life and her own, as she scrambled to sort out childcare while she was filming She Said and Dano shipped off to the other coast to shoot Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.

Below, Kazan dives in to how her own parents stepped in to help her during that very busy time (and again right now!), her methods for studying Kantor for the role, and updates us on her limited-series adaptation of East of Eden, which she says will be very different than the 1955 film directed by her grandfather Elia Kazan. 

Vanity Fair: As a screenwriter yourself, what did you think of She Said’s script when you first read it?

Zoe Kazan: Rebecca Lenkiewicz did an incredible job adapting their book. Jodi and Megan’s book, She Said, is full of incredible detail about their reporting, but it’s not really about them. I don’t think that they felt that comfortable positing themselves as the subjects of a piece. But Rebecca interviewed them and really brought out so much about their personal lives, which is in the film. It’s such a full portrait of what it is to be a working mother and womanhood as a whole.

What did you need from Jodi in order to portray her?

Jodi and Megan were incredibly generous with Carey and I, opening up their lives and making themselves really vulnerable to us. I can’t imagine having someone play me—the uncanniness of that feeling. Jodi and I met for dinner in Brooklyn and immediately I thought, Oh, this is a person I could know in my life. She just seemed really familiar to me. We have a lot of people in common—our kids went to the same preschool. Carey and I had decided very early on we weren’t gonna try to do an imitation of these people, that that would be distracting from the honesty of the story. Watching Jodi listen was a huge part of my preparation, getting a sense of how she is across the table. And then I asked her just a bunch of nosy questions like what do you bring into an interview? Are you using a recording device? Are you using a notebook? Um, how do you prepare? What kind of water bottle do you bring to work? Where do you buy your shoes? Who puts dinner on the table? How does that happen? Who helps you with childcare?

As you mentioned, the addition of their personal lives—being a working mom and a journalist—is definitely part of the story that struck me. It’s also something you tweeted about—finding that balance while you were shooting this—and I’m curious how that played into performing this role while you also were having to figure out that balance at the same time?

I was cast in She Said a few weeks after Paul was cast in The Fabelmans, and they shot concurrently. He was shooting The Fabelmans on the West Coast while I was filming in New York. I didn’t really know how we were going to do that. It seemed like an impossible lift. We have an incredible nanny, but she’s in grad school and can’t be with my kid all the time. My parents really pitched in. They moved across the country. They moved in with us for months and made it possible. And there’s no minute that I took that for granted, or any of the childcare that we have. It’s not in the movie, but at the same time that [Jodi] was breaking the story, Ron, her husband, was breaking a really important story and had to travel for that story as well. And I was like, “how did you do it?” And she said, “my mom and dad really pitched in.” It made me laugh because we were experiencing such similar things. Carey and I rewatched All the President’s Men in preparation for this film—and also just for fun—and the most you need to see of their personal lives in there is just like a messy bachelor apartment in the background. I feel like it’s like a shadow story—it’s like the untold part of all of our lives, especially because I think the lives of women in the middle of their life aren’t usually put onscreen.