Zazie Beetz Is Betting on Herself

Zazie Beetz is focused on being bad at things right now. She wants to get back into surfing. (“Terrible at that.”) She’d like to dabble in pole dancing. (“Not good at it.”) She’s feeling the pull to write more. (“Will I spend years on a script that never gets made? Maybe.”) Forget polished perfectionism—lately, the actor is looking to flirt with the possibility of failure.

“I have been wanting to make myself uncomfortable,” she explains over a video call from her home in Brooklyn. She’s sitting back on her living-room couch, with her legs folded into her chest in a way that indicates stream-of-consciousness concentration. Her long braids are parted to one side, her face is makeup-free and she’s staring off beyond the screen as she forms her thoughts. “It’s great if things can get made. It’s great if things end up pretty. But it’s the act of doing that helps you grow.”

If you couldn’t tell by the nostalgia-soaked goal-setting, I’m catching Beetz at a rather introspective time in her life. It’s been almost 10 years since the actor first shot to superstardom in Atlanta, FX’s Emmy-winning surrealist sitcom created by Donald Glover. In the decade that has followed, she’s played a poignant love interest in Joker and a luck-wielding mutant in Deadpool. She’s flowed between genres—from fast-paced action in Bullet Train to historical western in The Harder They Fall—with a versatility that has helped her transcend typecasting. Throughout this Hollywood tenure, she’s seen the scope of fame, public perception and social media drastically change. Hence the recent hunger for offline friction.

Her latest project, the sci-fi thriller Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, interrogates the stakes-free monotony of a life spent scrolling. Beetz plays Janet, a teacher living in a universe in which teenagers are soulless clones glued to their screens, harsh Wi-Fi signals can trigger nosebleeds and AI is threatening world domination. It’s freaky, strangely funny and entirely confronting to watch. After reading the script, Beetz wanted in immediately.

“I see the profound impact that AI and technology has on my life,” she says. “It replaces time I could spend with loved ones and things I want to do.” She has always been tech-skeptical, never having downloaded TikTok or Twitter and regularly going months without opening Instagram. She’s debated getting rid of the photo-sharing app altogether but admits that it’s part of her public-facing job. “I used to come home from school and draw or write stories for hours; that was my relaxing time,” she reflects. “And now those things take effort. I have to remind myself that those are my hobbies.” Ultimately, her return to tactility is a way of honouring her younger self.

“It’s great if things can get made. It’s great if things end up pretty. But it’s the act of doing that helps you grow.”

Beetz grew up singing all the time, dressing “weirdly” and performing in after-school plays. She was born in Berlin (her father is a German cabinetmaker) but raised in Manhattan (her mother is a city social worker). When she was a kid, New York was a “spiritually stimulating” home that nurtured all her creative endeavours. During annual visits back to Berlin in the early aughts, however, she sometimes felt othered. “I was the only person of colour there,” she remembers. Despite experiencing the reductive reactions that can come with being biracial, she credits her parents with instilling in her a strong sense of self. “I am Black and German, and I think the experience of both identities has allowed me to embrace nuance,” she says. “I try to see where people are coming from.”

This ability to find connection everywhere is part of what draws Beetz to the craft of acting. After college, she started auditioning while waiting tables. She met her now-husband, David Rysdahl, in a workshop in 2014 and booked Atlanta the following year. As a mid-20s artist still new to the scene, she wasn’t prepared for the show to blow up the way it did—a ride she calls the “greatest testament to exposure therapy.”

“I felt so much pressure not to fail, and I had a lot of imposter syndrome because this jump to success happened very quickly,” she explains. “I felt like I hadn’t earned my space, like I was going to be somehow ‘found out.’” Though she still struggles with performance anxiety today (“The amount of times I’ve cried in a trailer…”), Beetz looks back on this period with gratitude. “I still get nervous all the time, but confidence grows through experience.”

She reached a new milestone in this realm while filming 2026’s They Will Kill You, a campy horror in which Beetz stars as a housekeeper trapped in a satanic cult. “I’ve never been the true lead of a movie, and that’s a really important position on-set,” she says. “It comes with a lot of responsibility around setting the mood and encouraging others.” Emotions aside, it was a physically demanding job—in the first 20 minutes, she’s rolling around on the floor, fighting off cloaked villains and splattering blood with a machete—but the exhaustion thrilled Beetz. “There’s something so cool about waking up tired and pushing yourself to be your best.” When we chat, she’s in the midst of tackling another professional feat: doing “animal movement work” for an upcoming thriller, Kockroach, alongside Chris Hemsworth and Taron Egerton.

Despite her growing A-list resumé, the whole fame thing still feels strange. “My husband and I will have a little tiff on the train or something and then the person sitting next to us is like, ‘By the way, I’m a fan!’” she laughs. Beetz has said that she doesn’t identify with the celebrity lifestyle, and even our call feels less like a pre-scheduled interview and more like a FaceTime confessional. “I am by no means Beyoncé,” she says. “But I think you have to be incredibly strong to be so publicly seen, misunderstood and revered. I don’t know if I have the backbone for that, to be honest.”

It explains her complicated relationship with highly photographed appearances. Beetz is a fixture of best-dressed roundups, but she says she feels most stylish outside of industry events. Her love of fashion dates back to a defining moment when she was 12 and her dad came home with a copy of Fruits, the iconic Japanese Harajuku street-style magazine. “It changed my relationship with clothing forever,” she says. “The next day, I went to school full rainbow.” From that moment on, she has viewed outfit-assembling as the greatest gift of self-expression. She’ll dress as a fairy or a medieval woman and order corsets to complete costumes for everyday errands. “I am not a sweatpants-to-the-store girl. Like, I need to dress up.”

She describes her relationship with clothes as sacred—one she honours by never mocking her previous choices. “There are many things I stress about in life, but when I get dressed, I just feel so free,” she says. Red carpets are a different story. “There’s the politics of brands and questions about whether you look ‘put-together’ enough,” she laments. “You’re sitting stiff in a car for an hour and hoping nothing comes out of place—you’re kind of like a statue.” She’s working on finding her footing, but the scrutinizing nature of these environments makes it tough.

It’s impossible to talk about omnipresent celebrity dress codes without also mentioning the increasingly rigid beauty standards that inform them. In 2026, facelift discourse plagues female celebrities, peptides are the youth-chasing treatment du jour and “looksmaxxing” is a body-modifying movement that feels like a subplot straight out of Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. Luckily, Beetz—who is a few months away from turning 35—decided long ago that she’s done fussing over aging.

“We’re here for a blip anyway. How can we make the most of the fruits that life has to offer?”

“We assign a lot of negative connotation to the word ‘old’—we couple it with a mindset of irrelevance, unattractiveness and the end of everything,” she says. She points to her 93-year-old grandmother, who has a “spirit of extreme vitality” because of her earned wisdom. “I don’t want to fall into a trap of being afraid of what I might look like when I’m 80,” she continues. “Youth offers certain things, but it doesn’t offer everything. My face is going to wrinkle; my breasts will sag; I’ll have grey hair. Why would I waste time agonizing over this inevitability when I could just enjoy where I’m at?” Plus, being content with the present allows her to plan for what’s next.

At this stage of adulthood, Beetz is most excited about becoming a mom. Midwifery has always been her “obsession,” and with the wobbly uncertainty of her 20s firmly behind her, she feels ready to explore motherhood first-hand. “I think birth, pregnancy and postpartum are miracles,” she tells me. “Even in our modern world, we can’t simplify these things or make them easier. It’s this ancient part of ourselves that remains, and I find that incredibly moving.”

I point out the contrast between the tech-apocalypse talk at the start of our conversation versus the bright-eyed optimism guiding it now. How does Beetz hold on to hope when things seem so heavy? “Humankind has always endured great horrors, but life will prevail—for me, that’s very calming,” she hums. “We’re here for a blip anyway. How can we make the most of the fruits that life has to offer?” In other words, might as well lean into the thrill of something new, even if it means messing up.

Photography, Nick Merzetti. Publisher, Deidre Marinelli. Creative direction, George Antonopoulos. Editor-in-Chief, Liz Guber. Styling, Ashley Galang. Hair, Ikeyia Powell. Braids, Lacy Redway. Makeup, Tyron Machhausen for The Wall Group/Chanel. Lighting technician, Juan Delgado. Casting, Maddie Kelly. Fashion assistant, Hodaly Garcia. Fashion intern, Sheila Benitez.