I was jealous of Zooey Deschanel before I was ever mistaken for her.
It wasn’t her fame. No, it was her lineage. Back in high school, I wanted to be a cinematographer. Her father, famous director of photography Caleb Deschanel, was an idol of mine. So when family friends who sorta knew him told me I looked like his daughter Zooey, I was annoyed. This girl had my style, and her father was Caleb Deschanel? My father still used disposable cameras. Some girls got all the luck.
Then she became famous. And perversely – and to a much smaller degree – so did I.
At first I was flattered. When New Girl first premiered and people started coming up to me on the street, bubbling full of compliments and asking for my autograph, I wasn’t annoyed; I was flattered! After all, I was pretty enough to be Zooey Deschanel!
I knew something had changed when my father, who never pays attention to pop culture, started calling and leaving ecstatic voicemails. “Hey! You’re on Conan! Yucka, yucka yucka.” (His laugh always reminded me of Fozzie Bear, and he was almost as hairy.) My father explained his trick – he’d put the interview on mute, then pretend it was me up there on the old television. At parties my friends started to introduce me as “our real-life Zooey,” as if I weren’t real in my own right. Bartenders told me I “looked like that girl on TV,” pretending they didn’t know her name. This was Los Angeles. Everyone knew Zooey Deschanel, and yet everyone wanted to act as if they didn’t. It’s like when you go to a restaurant and see a celebrity and comment to your dinner partner to check out said celebrity dining at the table in the back. You glance back a couple of times. You shrug and continue to discuss the latest box-office flop. That’s it. It’s cool and so very Los Angeles to be coy.
Out apartment shopping in Burbank, paparazzi snapped my photo, unbeknownst to me. Then the Daily Mail published an article picking apart my (or Zooey’s) attire. It was not flattering. After that, I started dressing better, just in case.
Paparazzi aren’t coy. And as any Angeleno will tell you, they always show up eventually. Out apartment shopping in Burbank, paparazzi snapped my photo, unbeknownst to me. Then the Daily Mail published an article picking apart my (or Zooey’s) attire. It was not flattering. After that, I started dressing better, just in case. I couldn’t stand another public humiliation. Being a celebrity doppelgänger was hard enough; I couldn’t imagine how hard it must be to actually be famous. My respect for Zooey Deschanel, along with my annoyance, rose. I both blamed her and loved her for the public interest.
It got to be that I was afraid to leave the house in anything less than a ball gown. I complained repeatedly about how Zooey Deschanel had stolen my style – my life! Yet hypocritically, as much as I bitched about her, that didn’t stop me from dressing like her – or her from dressing like me.
And then, just as quickly as it began, the attention waned. New Girl went on its summer hiatus. Zooey wasn’t doing any films. And with Zooey Deschanel out of the limelight, I was too.
I’ll admit it – the grass really is always greener on the other side. I missed the attention. It was easier to tell potential hair stylists that I had a “Zooey vibe going.” They instantly knew what kind of cut I wanted. It was as recognizable as “the Rachel” from the ’90s but more hipster and cute. I knew when people said I looked like Zooey that they were calling me pretty. I basked in that compliment like a cat in a sunny window. It felt nice to be noticed. As a writer I didn’t get a lot of attention; most of my “fame” had to do with my words, not my looks. So when the comments stopped, my insecurity flourished. Suddenly, I felt ugly.
I started asking myself uncomfortable questions. Were people no longer calling me out because Zooey Deschanel wasn’t in the news or because I no longer looked like her? And if I no longer looked like her, did that mean I was no longer attractive? Had I gained weight? Was I more wrinkled? It didn’t help that this was coinciding with a birthday that put me perilously close to thirty. The lack of what originally gave me an identity crisis – my similarity in appearance to Zooey – was causing a new one all over again.
My boyfriend was beyond supportive and sweet. “I never thought you looked that much like her,” he said. “I love you for you.” But was I all that? Suddenly, I started feeling ordinary.
For a mental break, I went to visit my friend Stella, who taught kindergarten. During recess, I asked some of the children the usual question posed by us adults: what do you want to be when you grew up? It was meant to be a harmless question, a way to distract the boys from throwing sticks or pulling girls’ hair. Yet I grew increasingly unnerved when their responses to the latter all proved to be strangely uniform: famous. They didn’t want to be firemen or astronauts, nor did they desire a career that could possibly make them famous, like being an actor or a singer (or, God forbid, a writer). No, the constant response was “famous.” That’s what the kids wanted to be when they grew up. A career in “famous.”
“Zooey!” The men shouted, already snapping photos. “Zooey, over here!” “I’m not Zooey!” I replied. I looked around for help. A woman in a Suburban was staring. Then she took out her iPhone and snapped some photos. “I’m not!” I cried.
When I talked it over with Stella, we settled on the idea that perhaps more than fame, what the kids wanted was to be special. To be noticed. Like me, they didn’t want to be ordinary. They wanted to stand out. Fame means you are important enough for people to care about or even love.
“Hopefully, they’ll grow out of it,” Stella said. I thought about my own crisis of confidence and blushed.
I realized that my moodiness was ridiculous. My confidence slowly returned. On date night, I looked in the mirror and felt like I looked good – not because I looked like Zooey but because I looked like me. I stopped comparing myself and just started being myself.
And then fate came to give me one last nudge in the form of the paparazzi I had so wrongly thought I missed.
I was on my way to the gym when I noticed my car was low on gas. I pulled over to a small Silverlake gas station and got out of the car. It was something out of the movies: a beat-up car peeled into the spot in front of me, a man with a camera jumping out of the passenger seat before the car had even fully stopped. Behind me a man on a motorcycle stopped, also brandishing a camera like a weapon. I was trapped.
“Zooey!” The men shouted, already snapping photos. “Zooey, over here!”
“I’m not Zooey!” I replied. I looked around for help. A woman in a Suburban was staring. Then she took out her iPhone and snapped some photos. “I’m not!” I cried.
And then the paparazzi started to shout terrible things. They asked me about my (her) divorce from Ben Gibbard, which even by then was years old, and whether I’d “given up” on dating. Famous or not, those assumptions hurt. Then they made snide comments about my career. They made a lot of personal assumptions. Scared, I retreated into my car. This was a horrible nightmare. I was surrounded by bullies with cameras who wanted nothing more than to upset me. If only the kindergarteners could see this! This experience would scare anyone from the pursuit of fame. The grass here was not greener; it was on fire.
The paparazzi left as quickly as they came, no doubt speeding off to torture some other celebrity or celebrity look-alike. Soon all that was left of the mayhem was the woman with her Suburban. She took a picture of my license plate before catching my eye and getting back into her car.
There was no way I was going to the gym now. I was exhausted and overwrought. I felt as if I’d hiked 15 miles alone on no food or water. I felt lucky to be alive. Driving home, I noticed my hands were shaking. Without fully understanding why, I started to cry.
Later that night, I tried to see the whole experience as a compliment. I had been in gym clothes, and I wasn’t wearing makeup, and still they mistook me for the adorable, adorkable Zooey Deschanel. Yet somehow that made it all the more depressing. They saw dark hair, bangs, and a T-shirt with a smiling flower. All that plus a similar body build and a hip neighborhood spelled Zooey. I couldn’t help but wonder: if the paparazzi, trained photographers, couldn’t see the real Zooey Deschanel, who could? Did any of us truly see her or each other?
I wanted to see me.
The next morning I made an appointment with my hair stylist. I dyed my hair back to its more original light-auburn color. “You’ll no longer get compared to Zooey Deschanel,” she warned as she applied the dye to my hair. “That’s the idea,” I replied.
Three hours later, I looked in the mirror and smiled. I no longer looked like Zooey Deschanel. I looked like me. And I loved it.