Zoe Kazan

Zoe Swicord Kazan, born September 9, 1983, in Los Angeles, California, is an American actress, playwright, and screenwriter whose career spans stage, film, and television. The daughter of screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord, she is the granddaughter of film and theatre director Elia Kazan and playwright Molly Kazan. Elia Kazan was an Anatolian Greek emigrant from Istanbul, and Molly was a Mayflower descendant; the family surname was originally Kazantzoglou. Kazan attended the Wildwood School, Windward School, and the Marlborough School in Hancock Park, Los Angeles before enrolling at Yale University, where she was a member of the Manuscript Society and earned a Bachelor of Arts in theatre in 2005.

Kazan's professional stage career began with a 2006 off-Broadway revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, starring Cynthia Nixon. The following year she appeared in a New Group production of 100 Saints You Should Know, which earned her a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play. Also in 2007, she acted alongside Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage in Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke. Her Broadway debut came in January 2008 in a revival of William Inge's Come Back, Little Sheba, in which she appeared opposite S. Epatha Merkerson and Kevin Anderson. That same fall, she returned to Broadway to play Masha in a revival of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, sharing the stage with Kristin Scott Thomas, Carey Mulligan, and Peter Sarsgaard. In 2010, she joined Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell in Martin McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane, which ran through June 6 of that year. Kazan returned to Broadway in 2024 in a revival of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt: A Parable, opposite Amy Ryan and Liev Schreiber, portraying Sister James, a nun who suspects a priest of misconduct.

Kazan made her film debut in 2003 in Swordswallowers and Thin Men and subsequently appeared in supporting roles in The Savages (2007), Fracture, In the Valley of Elah, and Revolutionary Road (2008). She wrote and starred in the comedy-romance Ruby Sparks (2012), directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris and featuring Paul Dano, Antonio Banderas, Annette Bening, and Steve Coogan; the screenplay earned her an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Screenplay. She starred opposite Daniel Radcliffe in the romantic comedy What If (2013), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival under the title The F Word. In 2017, she co-starred with Kumail Nanjiani, Holly Hunter, and Ray Romano in The Big Sick, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. That same year she appeared in The Deuce, an HBO drama series in which she recurred from 2017 to 2019. In 2018, Kazan co-wrote the film Wildlife with Paul Dano, who also directed; the film, based on Richard Ford's 1990 novel, starred Carey Mulligan and Jake Gyllenhaal. Also in 2018, she appeared in the Coen Brothers' Western anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in the vignette "The Gal Who Got Rattled." In 2022, she portrayed journalist Jodi Kantor in She Said, opposite Carey Mulligan as Megan Twohey.

On television, Kazan appeared in four episodes of HBO's Bored to Death in 2010 and starred in the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge in 2014 alongside Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, and Bill Murray, a role that earned her a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or Movie. In 2020, she starred in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America as Elizabeth "Bess" Levin, alongside Winona Ryder, Anthony Boyle, and John Turturro. She subsequently starred in the Netflix miniseries Clickbait (2021).

As a playwright, Kazan wrote Absalom, which premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky in 2009, having been developed since her junior year at Yale. The play centers on a father's fraught relationships with his children. Her second play, We Live Here, received its world premiere at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theater Club from October 12 to November 6, 2011, directed by Sam Gold and featuring Amy Irving. Her third play, Trudy and Max in Love, opened at South Coast Repertory in 2014, and After the Blast followed in 2017.