Zazie Beetz and I get off to a bad start. Best known for her role as Van in Donald Glover’s hit comedy show Atlanta — for which she bagged an Emmy nomination in 2018 — she is sitting outside a coffee shop, speaking to me via Zoom. The picture is grainy and 15 minutes in she disappears. Some time later “David” joins the call. Beetz is using the phone of her fiancé, the actor and writer David Rysdahl, and is sitting in the passenger seat of their car. “Mine is on charge,” she says apologetically, adjusting her silk headscarf, which is tied Monroe-style below the chin and held in place by two pearl hair slides.
Beetz, 30, is unperturbed by the chaotic start. A level of cool-headedness she has developed, I suspect, to cope with the life-changing levels of success she has achieved over the past five years. Beetz was a year out of college, “broke and waiting tables”, when she was cast in Atlanta. Since then, she has gone from indie darling to action hero, landing big roles in both Marvel and DC films. She starred alongside Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 2, opposite Joaquin Phoenix in the Oscar-winning Joker, and in the critically acclaimed animated series Invincible on Amazon Prime, a modern take on the superhero genre.
By this time next year she will be known for a host of new roles too: as the Hornet in Bullet Train, an action thriller starring Brad Pitt; as a lead in Nine Days, and as Stagecoach Mary in the Jay-Z produced The Harder They Fall. One of the most hyped films of the year, The Harder They Fall is being billed as Netflix’s first black western, and reportedly cost £65 million to make, with a cast that includes Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield and Jonathan Majors.
It is undoubtedly her biggest project to date. The cast, who play two rival gangs, spent months in “cowboy camp” brushing up their horse riding and gun skills. “Nobody got hurt, but we did get bucked a few times,” Beetz says. She bonded with King, whom she describes as a mentor figure, while of Elba, she says: “He’s charming, kind, strong and immensely talented.” The next Bond, perhaps? “I can definitely see it.”
The film is inspired by historical figures, including Nat Love (the lead character, played by Majors), who was born into slavery in Tennessee. After the Civil War, he became one of the most notorious cowboys in the Old West, also going by the name of Deadwood Dick.
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“There were a lot of black people in the West, and it was not a rare thing or an anomaly,” Beetz says. “The fact that we have been erased from the general portrayal of the Old West makes it seem radical to introduce us into the narrative, when really it’s just a more realistic depiction of who was living there at that time.”
Makers of westerns have a track record of whitewashing the history of the Wild West. In the 1951 film Tomahawk, for example, a white actor was cast as the character based on American explorer Jim Beckwourth, despite the fact that Beckwourth was black. But the decision to cast Beetz as Stagecoach Mary has been criticised too. Mary was the first African-American woman to work as a star-route mail carrier, on which she encountered her fair share of bandits. An old sepia photograph shows her mean-mugging, rifle in hand. But the picture also shows her to be dark-skinned, and some online commenters have said that the choice of a light-skinned actress is colourist.
Beetz is biracial: her father, a cabinet-maker, is “very German” and her mother, who works in social care, African-American. She has a 14-year-old half-brother on her mother’s side. Born in Berlin, she moved with her family to New York when she was one. “Germany at the time was more homogenous,” she tells me. “My parents wanted me to grow up around people that looked like me — and that didn’t look like me.”
However, last month the feminist site Jezebel published a piece on Hollywood’s colourism problem, citing Beetz as an example.
“This is something that I think about a lot and consider when contemplating any role that I take,” she says. “I understand the privilege that I have as a light-skinned woman and it’s always on my mind. I have, multiple times, turned down roles because I felt I wasn’t the correct choice for the character. At the time when I read this script, almost all the other cast members had already signed on. I could see that the characters were largely based on fiction and not truly on their historical counterparts, and that none of the characters actually bore much physical likeness to the actors that played them … I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to explore an iconic genre, the spaghetti western, and make it something new.”
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Her mixed-race identity has been a source of discomfort over the years. “I struggled with it in terms of not feeling like I’m either identity fully,” she says. She recalls one instance, when she was 11 or 12: “I was a part of this leadership programme for young black girls. We were all in the cafeteria when some song came on, and all the girls started dancing. I was like, what is this? What is this dance? What is the song? It’s a superficial example, but I remember having a really visceral reaction and thinking, ‘Am I not black enough?’ ”
Her mother was vital in helping her to navigate questions of race. “She taught me that my existence doesn’t have to be validated by anybody. I’m black enough, because I am black,” she says resolutely. Beetz’s parents divorced when she was five but were “very adult about the situation”. They lived on different floors of the same block in Washington Heights and she would alternate between the two on a nightly basis. “They did a beautiful job. I felt very much like both parents raised me,” she says.
One of the things that attracted her to The Harder They Fall was that race is presented as almost incidental. The film is not about black cowfolk, but about cowfolk who happen to be black. “The depiction of black people just living and [race] not necessarily being the focal point of the narrative is something I really enjoyed about the project,” she says. “Blackness isn’t defined by whiteness.”
She is speaking to me from Atlanta, where filming for the fourth series of Glover’s show is under way. In 2016 when she landed the part Beetz was virtually unknown. She experienced “exhausting” levels of impostor syndrome at the time, which she sometimes still struggles with. Today she manages it through mindfulness and phone calls with David (they met during an acting workshop and have been together for seven years).
Beetz was recently named as Max Mara’s Face of the Future Honoree for 2021, but concedes that she’s not one for high-end fashion. Her Instagram (which has 741,000 followers) is far more likely to feature a video on the merits of composting or a recipe for homemade “period tea” than a red-carpet selfie. She is passionate about the environment, and prefers to shop second-hand. “In my private life, I’m trying to consume less clothing and be intentional in what I need and don’t need. I’ve done red carpets where I’ve styled myself and rented from vintage places,” she says, alluding to a sheer T-shirt and billowing black skirt worn to announce the nominations for the 2020 Independent Spirit awards.
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My questions about the rumoured sequel to Joker, and whether or not Beetz will be starring in Deadpool 3, are met with a mysterious shrug. But there’s no shortage of opportunities, and she is embracing her new-found confidence. “It’s fascinating to see myself so calm when I enter new jobs. Initially I thought, I’ll never be able to direct anything, I don’t know how to produce, I can’t write. Now I’m, like, these are all things I can try. I’ve worked through fear a lot of times in this industry and I can potentially work through fear again.”
The Harder They Fall is available to stream on Netflix
