The folks over at A.V. Club recently sat down with Zooey Deschanel and while the focus was mainly on Deschanel’s musical career, the interview did shed a little bit of light on her upcoming film and TV projects.
It’s been a quiet year for Deschanel. Since starring in the 2009 summer hit “500 Days of Summer,” Deschanel’s film appearances have been few and far between. There was one guest appearance on sister Emily Deschanel’s TV show “Bones,” as well as a few amusing clips on “Funny or Die,” but the paucity of appearances seem to be an intentional move. Deschanel tells the interviewer that while she was much more active earlier in her career, she now “rarely does movies” and is now “much more choosy” (let’s hope this means she learned a lesson from “The Happening”). This has resulted in her doing “one movie a year for the past couple years.”
While 2010 won’t contain a feature-film release with a Zooey Deschanel credit, 2011 looks to be a big year for the doe-eyed actress-cum-chanteuse. Reuniting with her “All The Real Girls” director David Gordon Green, Deschanel recently filmed “Your Highness,” joining a cast that includes Danny McBride, Natalie Portman, James Franco and Justin Theroux. After being told that her character’s name in the film is the same as a well-known porn actress (Belladonna), Deschanel admitted that the film is, “the dirtiest medieval comedy you will ever see. I will guarantee you that. Oh my God, it’s ridiculously dirty. I mean, it’s like the most dirty humor that you could possibly come up with.”
Her next film, “My Idiot Brother,” includes stars such as Paul Rudd, Emily Mortimer, Elizabeth Banks, and Rashida Jones, who plays Deschanel’s girlfriend, but Deschanel doesn’t understand the hoopla surrounding the lesbian storyline: “It’s not any different. It’s just like playing people with the same problems straight people have.”
Deschanel also talked about her upcoming HBO groupie project. We previously reported that the actress was set to star and executive produce a half-hour pilot adaptation of Pamela Des Barres’ “I’m With The Band: Confessions of A Groupie.” It now seems that while Deschanel will appear and produce the show, it will be “really loosely based” on the Des Barres memoir. “[It’s] not even the same person,” she said, noting that the character is not even a groupie. We’re not sure if she is using the same thinking that got Kate Hudson’s character in “Almost Famous” into all that trouble (band-aids only give blowjobs apparently) but we suppose all we can do is wait and see.
“Your Highness” will be released on April 8th, 2011. Deschanel’s untitled groupie project is still early in its development.