One Nightstand With Zazie Beetz

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at the blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Zazie Beetz has been working as an actor for more than a decade, but she still gets nervous when starting a new project. Case in point: her new Apple TV thriller Nocturne, in which she stars as an undercover FBI agent opposite Liev Schreiber and Stephen Graham. “On the first day I called my mom crying because I was like, ‘I’m so nervous. What if they don’t like me? What if I’m bad?’” the 35-year-old says. “I’ll never forget, she was like, ‘Zazie, just go in there with love in your heart and just spread love onto everyone. Just come in — your heart is open and just give love.’ I don’t know why it just resonated with me — like, ‘Yes, I’m not going to close in fear. I’m going to open and offer what I need.’”

For Beetz, who was born in Berlin and split her early childhood between Germany and New York before her family settled there when she was eight, the approach worked. Nocturne is a taut thriller, adapted from Lars Kepler’s book The Sandman, in which Graham turns in a terrifying performance as a serial killer who represents the worst of humanity. It’s Beetz’s character, Saga Bauer, who has to find ways to get through to him, and so she sought to find the shades of gray. “I’m always trying to kind of come at this — again, not excusing the Jurek character for killing people — but where is this coming from? What’s his mind around this? What’s the non-typical approach that I don’t necessarily understand that this character is experiencing and why?” she says.

It’s an approach she also took in far less contentious circumstances, such as when she played Van in Atlanta. Beetz’s character was pilloried by fans of the show in Season 3 when she abandoned her daughter to go on a trip to Paris, though Beetz has always defended the choice. “I’m always defensive of my characters,” she says. “People are human, and there are certainly things you don’t want to inflict on other people — or as a parent, you don’t want to let your emotions get in the way of creating a life or harming your children or something like that — but ultimately we are individuals first, and things happen. And for me, for Van, I’m like — Her child was safe and fine, and she needed a moment. And that happens whether or not we approve.”

Nevertheless, the work is still hard, and it’s her husband — fellow actor David Rysdahl, with whom she’s expecting her first child — who helps support her when that’s the case. “He’s made me a better performer,” she says. “Firstly, just by being my literal biggest fan, which is great. But then also, he’s just so talented and I think he’s very bold in his approach — I feel like when we are discussing a role, we question everything and try to get to the bottom of it all… He’s, I think, much better at character analyses than I am… I don’t think I would have as rich characters without him at all. And so I think he has really helped me with that and helped build my confidence and has literally picked me up off the floor when I felt so scared to go on set.”

Hard as it is, it’s this humanity in the work which continues to draw her to it. “Acting is extremely vulnerable, especially in the very blunt context of you're going on set, there are a hundred people there you’ve never met, and then you’re like, ‘All right, I’m just going to do something,’” she says. “And sometimes you look dumb or you make a bad choice and it’s bad and you’re bad. That happens. And the best actors in the world are sometimes just bad. And you have to accept that a hundred people saw that and thought that was really bad…How do you move through that and move on? And that’s been a huge part of my journey in this industry and in my career — not focusing so much on that sensation and how that would shut me down.”

Keep reading to discover four of Beetz’s favorite books.

Her first pick is John Steinbeck’s 1952 epic East of Eden. Despite the timing of the choice, she has yet to see Netflix’s adaptation. “I’m usually not one to like an adaptation,” she says. “You have such a personal relationship with these stories that I often am like, ‘You’re ruining what was in my head’ or, ‘You're veering off,’ and then I just get mad.”

Beetz has complicated feelings about the novel’s contentious female protagonist, Cathy. “I don’t think Steinbeck loves women but I think that they are the most interesting characters and extremely complicated and complex,” she says. “I don’t know if she’s an antihero really, but kind of this protagonist that you’re…I don’t know if you’re rooting for her, but you’re also just there with her. I think so much of what motivates her is also fear and I think that that can turn into aggression and rejection.”

She’s also drawn to those complexities in her own life. “I really do believe that context exists for everything and you’re a villain in someone’s life,” she says. “For me, as a person who’s not religious, I would say I have sort of spirituality in my own approach. I do think ultimately I will perceive things a certain way due to my cultural learnings, due to what I think is bad. I will perceive death as bad because I have emotional attachments and things like that.”

Her second choice is Sapiens, a digestible human history from history professor Yuval Noah Harari. “What I love about the book is it’s written for a lay person. It’s very accessible,” she says. “When works are available for people to read and enjoy and there’s pictures, it’s just a great read.”

The book, which she says shows how expansive yet personal humanity can be, also offered her valuable perspective on humankind as a whole. “I liked the idea that every creature on this planet has a special thing. A dog can smell, and a fish can swim,” she says. “I feel like for humans — and we’re animals and, to me, have the same value as any other creature — our special thing is our imagination and our ability to tell stories, which as a creative is very validating.”

At the same time, Beetz is worried about the future of human imagination. “I am a very black-and-white thinker on AI. I fall in the camp of [thinking] it’s devastating to our culture and our minds,” she says. “Obviously there’s so many things at risk — safety and all of that — but I feel like the greatest risk is our minds, our cognitive abilities and even just asking little questions. I keep thinking, ‘What am I robbing myself of if I’m not going out and seeking these answers in a different way?’”

Her third selection is The Giver by Lois Lowry, a Newbery Medal-winning middle-grade novel which follows a 12-year-old boy named Jonas living in a “utopian” society where emotion has been eliminated. Selected as the Receiver of Memory for his community, Jonas learns that in sheltering themselves from bad memories and emotions, the community has also deprived themselves of happy ones.

“It’s this book around literally what we’ve just been talking about — the fear of what the consequence is of choosing security, safety, comfort, and how it creates a life devoid of richness,” she says. “When I was younger, I remember I was speaking with a therapist and I just kept talking about all these bad feelings I was having, and it just felt very devastating to me at the time. And she was like, ‘These aren't bad feelings, you’re just having a richer experience. You’re just having richer feelings, and with depth also can come darkness.’”

That kind of vulnerability has been on her mind as she expects her first child. “I think about becoming a parent, I’m opening my heart to potentially the greatest heartbreak of my life if something happens to my child, which I hope of course never does,” she says. “But to open that chamber in my heart, that possibility of love and relationship that I would love to experience, I have to also open a chamber of potential pain.”

Her final pick is The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s 1988 philosophical novel that follows a young Spanish shepherd through the ups and downs of his journey to Egypt. The book advocates following your own personal journey and heeding your intuition. “I read it at a time when I just really needed it. It was very soothing for me,” she says. “It’s allowed me, I think, just a lot of acceptance and sort of surrender in general and being like, ‘I am here for this time and I’m just going to have my experience and I’m going to experience it, [and] also be OK to observe.’”

Beetz is a believer that everything happens for a reason. “I don’t fully believe in free will in a way because I think from the moment of the Big Bang, the moment that first atom went out in one direction [there was] only one series of events that can happen from that expulsion of energy,” she says. “Every single decision that I made in my life is because this dinosaur met that dinosaur, and then that dinosaur met that dinosaur. And then everything was just a domino effect from that first moment.”

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