Zoey Deutch loves a good laugh. “I mean, is there anything better than being in a room and laughing with 1,300 people?” she poses, rhetorically. “I don’t think so.”

The 31-year-old actor speaks to me on a sunny January afternoon. She’s recently returned from a weekend in Utah, where her most recent film, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, debuted at Sundance Film Festival to roaring laughter heard blocks from Park City’s Eccles Theater. The film, in which she stars alongside John Slattery and Jon Hamm, is a 93-minute escapade into a Kansas bride-to-be’s quest to bed Hamm, her celebrity hall pass, before her wedding day. “[The film is] so insane,” Deutch says, grinning ear to ear. “It’s really ridiculous.”

There is an art to ridiculousness, Deutch proposes. Comedy requires vulnerability, a trait notably absent from a world that feels divorced from any real intimacy. “It requires incredibly bright people with a lot of experience to make you laugh like that,” she says of Gail Daughtry director David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer). “Right now, there’s a real gap in a way that I don’t remember [happening before] in my life,” she says. “At least, there just aren’t as many comedies being made.” Making someone laugh is simultaneously calculated and instinctive—a culmination of the unscripted humor in everyday life and the meticulous commentary on our very existence into one gut-punching joke. It’s a manipulation of the senses and the synapses, one that’s tricked the brain into pure, unadulterated glee.

If one takes even a passing glance at Deutch’s filmography, it’s clear that she has had to seriously consider the mechanics of genre—in the past year alone, audiences have seen her as a sardonic waitress grappling with the unexpected aftermath of a ménage à trois in The Threesome; as the spunky American French New Wave actress Jean Seberg in Nouvelle Vague, directed by Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Boyhood); and as an environmental lawyer on the brink of an authoritarian overhaul in Anniversary. You might even know her as the loveable ditz Madison in 2019’s Zombieland: Double Tap or, most likely, when she handily contributed to the late-2010s revitalization of the rom-com as the eager-to-please corporate assistant Harper in Set It Up alongside co-star Glen Powell. Even more, this year she will grace our screens as Jill in the romantic comedy Voicemails for Isabelle.

Deutch was a boisterous child, raised in Los Angeles by her parents, actor Lea Thompson and director Howard Deutch. Humor and wit were her first language, her medium of choice for connection and vulnerability.

“I was really loud,” she says. “I don’t know if I was funny, but I definitely valued and was drawn to people who were—people who made me laugh. It was kind of my love language with my dad. I felt like if I could make him laugh, then he loved me.”

A character, however, is born from more than just magnetism. When Deutch approaches a role, she becomes their animator and their executor, undertaking extensive preparation to portray their intentions, their obstacles, their hopes, their regrets, their whole real lives. “I tend to be someone who over-prepares,” she says. “It’s my favorite part.”

Character maps, Alexander Technique movement exercises, dream work, dialect coaching, and more all go into Deutch’s careful unspooling of a character’s inner life, each utterly unique, covered in her fingerprints. She likens the experience to a past-life regression—inhabiting an unfamiliar existence that is still wholly yours—the subject of many of her late grandmother’s paintings.

“Sometimes it feels like when I’m thinking back on my life, I’m like, ‘Whoa, was that my life, or someone else’s life?’” Deutch says. “You just get to live so many lives in this one life, which is really a gift.”

What’s the gift of life worth if not to go out on a limb? To Deutch, this question is quite literal, and our conversation turns to Alex Honnold, the American free-solo climber who just days before our meeting, scaled the 1,667-foot skyscraper Taipei 101 in Taiwan without any ropes or safeguards. His ascent was live-streamed by Netflix, the first televised event of its kind in recent memory.

“I’m obsessed with him. I think Alex Honnold is fascinating,” she remarks. “I watched the whole thing live. I was terrified, I could barely watch it.”

While some have critiqued Honnold’s free-solo endeavors as reckless or dismissed his accomplishments as a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, Deutch thinks Honnold is an exemplary specimen of grit. “He trains every single day of his life, and he has put himself in these extreme situations to build up to this point, and he has changed his brain,” she says. Honnold’s amygdala is unusually low-functioning, making him less likely to feel the emotion we call fear than other people.

“People want to believe he’s just built differently,” she continues. “He’s just like everybody else, but he just works really, really hard. I love that he talks about that, because I think that applies to everything in life.”

Honnold has trained himself to be fearless. Deutch has, in her own way, done the same in her professional life—and in her eyes, this training is the key to greatness. It’s no small feat of courage to stand up on stage and sing before an audience, to cry in front of a camera, or to make an absolute fool of yourself for a laugh. It’s an effortful endeavor, one that Deutch has spent her life courting in a mesmerizing pas de deux.

“It’s so cute that we all like to think that it’s just easy for somebody else,” she says. “It’s not easy for anybody to do anything amazing.”

And it certainly wasn’t easy for Deutch to join her longtime friend and The Politician co-star Ben Platt onstage at his Live at the Ahmanson concert residency in Los Angeles last December. The pair sang “Unworthy of Your Love,” a duet by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Assassins. It was the first time Deutch had sung onstage in this capacity, and it was terrifying.

“I love to sing so much, but my greatest fear is getting on stage,” she tells me. “I was proud of myself that when he asked me, I didn’t even think twice. I just said yes, because I knew I had to do it.”

Fear, to Deutch, is something to be confronted and conquered. It’s the only way we make it through life with any kind of certainty, no matter how false it might be. “If you don’t experience fear, your brain creates it in other places,” she says. “You do have to do scary things sometimes. It’s good for you.”

Deutch credits her mother for showing her how to face discomfort head-on. “She was always doing things that made her uncomfortable or that maybe she didn’t really want to do,” she says. “[She would tell me,] ‘Yes, go out there. Even if it’s not perfect, you’ve got to keep doing it.’”

And so that’s what Deutch did. Eleven years ago, when cult-favorite director Richard Linklater told her about Nouvelle Vague, a French New Wave-style film about the making of the quintessential Jean-Luc Godard flick Breathless (a film that Deutch says is among her most re-watched), she took the plunge. She cut off her hair, learned three different dialects, and flew to Paris to play the real-life, French-speaking American actress Jean Seberg, in a filmmaking process that lasted over a decade. Because that’s just what you do.

So what does Zoey Deutch’s comfort zone look like? Well, to start, she’s often at home. She meditates every morning and night, marking her gratitude in parallel to her circadian rhythm. She loves eating with and cooking for her family, her fiancé Jimmy Tatro, and her dog, Maybelle. Chicken thighs, broccoli, golden beets, and homemade broth are staples in Deutch’s kitchen. “I had no interest in cooking until I fell in love,” she tells me.

For Deutch, a lot of things are born out of love. The highs, the lows, the laughs, the opportunities, the regrets—each one is an expression of gratitude and love for the life one is given, and the life one creates for themselves. After all, in Zoey Deutch’s words: “I love an adventure.”

Photographed by Chris Noltekuhlmann 

Styled by Christopher Campbell 

Written by Abby Shewmaker

Hair: Marissa Marino

Makeup: Shelby Smith

Nails: Bana Barjour

Flaunt Film: Jonathan Ho

Flaunt Film Editor: Roberto De Jesus

Colorist: Juliana Ronderos

Styling Assistant: Mia Hurley and Ashlyn Paulson

Production Assistant: Casey Lea White

Location: WVRK Studio