Zooey Deschanel Explains Why She Took a Break From Social Media

Put Zooey Deschanel 
in front of a camera
 and she’s all fish gape, surprise smile, leg up,
leg down. The bangs shine, and yuuuge blue eyes pop. On the L.A. set of her Cosmo cover shoot, she turns to the side and rests a hand on her stomach before catching herself. That pose is napalm for pregnancy rumors. “I already had
 the baby!” she jokes, referring to her 15- month-old daughter
 with producer/investor Jacob Pechenik. They met working on last year’s movie Rock the Kasbah and married shortly 
before baby Elsie Otter Pechenik came last August.

We break for lunch and
 a chat. Zooey in front of a recorder is stiffer, more measured. She doesn’t really want to be here. It’s nothing personal; she’s just not much for publicity. Lately, she tells me, she’s not much for anything beyond hanging out with her new family. But then, she’s super stoked for her new animated film, Trolls, so here we are.

It has been a long buildup 
to the kiddie musical’s November 4 release. Zooey’s costars Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake have done the 
bulk of the junketing. Justin’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!”— written for the DreamWorks’ feature — dropped last May and was if not the song of the summer, certainly one of them. In July, MAC Cosmetics pinged nostalgia for the neon-haired, bare-assed toys with its limited-edition Good Luck Trolls collection. And designer Betsey Johnson’s xox Trolls Collection hit Macy’s in September.

But Zooey’s character isn’t one of the beloved ugly-cute dolls. She’s an ugly-ugly Bergen (an ogre the color of a marathon runner’s toenail). She has a heart of gold and, at one point, raps. “That was, like, the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Zooey says, laughing. As the She of folksy duo She & Him, with musician M. Ward, the 36-year-old has a throwback sound that’s about as hip-hop as the Snuggle Bear. (Listen no further than
 the pair’s new Christmas Party album, their second devoted
 to holiday music.) So when Zooey showed up at the studio to record the movie’s remix of Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” she just assumed the rap verse wasn’t for her. “They were like, are you ready to rap? I was like, uhhh....Justin Timberlake was producing it. He was there, and obviously, I have great admiration for the man. I didn’t want to screw it up, but the one thing I can’t do is that. It was really scary, but Justin was a great coach. He talked me through it because I had zero experience.”

Zooey does have some experience with being the odd girl out. Her love for all things old — vintage dresses, vinyl albums — is more innate than acquired. A flashback to her childhood bedroom would show black-and-white movie stills, not Leonardo DiCaprio, Scotch-taped to its walls. Part of it is having parents in the biz — her mom, Mary Jo, is an actress; dad, Caleb, a five-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer. “There was the possibility that I would see one of those people,” she recalls. “That was too embarrassing to me that I would have a picture of somebody on my wall.” But mainly, she’s just never gone all in on what’s popular. “I remember people listening to a certain radio station, and I was like, blech! I like oldies! You guys don’t know what you’re talking about.” Basically, if current pop culture were cilantro, Zooey would be one of those people who tastes soap when she eats it.

Funny, since she stars in one of network TV’s most main-stream hits. But hey, Fox’s New Girl, now in its sixth season, hinges upon the offbeat, okay, yes, quirks of its characters. Not just Zooey’s Jess but her whack-a-mole guy friends as well. Last season, the series, created by Liz Meriwether, pulled off giving its title star a proper maternity leave with a story line that saw Jess sequestered on a jury. In the episode titled “No Girl,” the gang “awws” at a short news telecast about the birth of an otter at the zoo. It was a clever nod to Zooey’s real-life birth of a baby girl, middle name Otter. I ask her about the scene, but she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “Oh, that’s so sweet,” she says, surprised yet touched.

Despite being an executive producer, she says she completely unplugged from NG during her leave. “They were running things by me, but we’ve been doing the show for so long now,” she says, “it’s not like anything dramatic was going to happen. I wasn’t going to come back and it’d be a thriller.” She’s set to direct the first episode of the new season, her first time in that role. But I sense that she has one Repetto’d foot out the door. How many seasons does she have left in her? “Two,” she says, no hesitation, then demurs. “I mean, I don’t want to answer that question. That’s too hard. It’s complicated.” Only time (and contract negotiations) will tell. Still, she realizes how incredibly fortunate she was to have had the time off and laments that “we live in a country that doesn’t give paid maternity leave. I felt very lucky to have an employer who was understanding and let me have, like, four months with my baby before I had to go back to work.”

Motherhood is blowing her frickin’ mind at the moment.
“I always thought that I would become a mom and be like myself...but a mom,” she says. “What I realized is when you have a child, the person who you were before cannot exist again — not in a bad way. But you bring your baby home from the hospital, and you can never not be thinking about that baby again. It’s a huge shift, you
 go, ‘Ohmygod! I’m gone.’” She pauses to consider the shift. “I’m a different and more complex person than I was before. Being a mother is so much more than the housewifey thing. It’s an attachment to another human being that is so alien to our modern understanding of things. It’s primal. It’s amazing.”

Traveling with Elsie though? Not so great. Zooey’s breastfeeding, and getting her pumped milk through airport security, she says, has been a nightmare: “You get aggressively frisked every time. The last time we traveled, they called in, like, 
the explosives unit. I’m like, the baby’s right here! It’s for her!
 I get it — they want to be very careful, but it’s odd that there’s so much regulation on bringing baby bottles on the airplane. You get raked over the coals. Not everybody, but I have been.”

Sadly, security won’t be chilling out anytime ever. We’ve met in late July of a summer that’s been ravaged by senseless violence. And Zooey, like all of us, is at a loss on how to deal. “A 
lot of very strange, tragic, sad, unfathomable things have happened,” she begins, “to the point where you’re like, no amount of thoughts and prayers can make this better. It makes me more reflective. I took a social-media break because everyone feels the need to comment on everything immediately. Sometimes, we need to be thoughtful about what we say.”

A formerly prolific tweeter, whose one-liners like “I wish my dogs could text me” racked up tens of thousands of Likes, Zooey’s gone fairly quiet on the platform in recent years. Of her early Twitter stardom she says, “I was at a different point in my life, and also different things were going on in the world. Now, I don’t really want to make jokes about it, but I
 also don’t know how else 
to respond other than making jokes. It’s a great forum for that, but I just don’t feel comfortable anymore.”

In June, she suffered a personal loss when the actor Anton Yelchin died, pinned by his car in a freak accident. The two worked together in The Driftless Area: “That was so close to home and just so random.” She found out about his passing on the news. “I thought it was a joke, like, this can’t be real. He was such a sweet, innocent person and so talented. I worked with him in Vancouver, and I was going off to Morocco to do a movie. He was like, ‘Hey, will you e-mail me and let me know you get in safe?’ He was the nicest. It’s devastating.”

Really, Twitter isn’t what it used to be, she says. There are too many trolls and not of the huggy, fuzzy franchise variety (although they do often show their asses). “When [Twitter] first started, it felt more experimental. People who were on there had a certain understanding of when I might be sarcastic or joking around or not. Now
 it feels less like that. I always enjoyed social media, but it’s fraught. We don’t have any precedent for it.” I mention SNL’s Leslie Jones and the violent hate speech and images to which she was subjected in July. “It’s horrifying. It’s just dangerous. That behavior cannot be tolerated,” Zooey says.

She cofounded the good-vibes-only website Hello Giggles in 2011 in part to combat such behavior. Time Inc. bought the site reportedly for around $20 million last year. Zooey’s been hands-off for a while. Still, when the company shuttered the site’s New York office a few weeks before our meeting, the layoff news led with her name. “I didn’t even know about it until I read it online,” she tells me. “Even when we sold it, I was a very minority shareholder. I’d been diluted, so it’s funny when they name-check me.” Of why she stepped away, she says, “It was kind of like when people have a kid. They get older and have school and soccer practice, and you don’t need to be as involved. HelloGiggles was my baby. We all nurtured it and I’m really proud of it, but then it took on a life of its own.”

Zooey, who’s been married once before to Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, says she avoided the WTF-am-I-doing?s that the site helps teens and 20 somethings navigate. But, she allows, “you’re always figuring something out. There’s never a time when you’re like ‘Okay! Everything’s figured
 out! I’m done now!’” She takes her own approach to handling stress. “I think anxiety in general isn’t rational. Fear is an actual thing. Humans have evolved to where we live in these very civilized societies but we still have our fight-or-flight instinct, so we’re going to have some of those physiological things like heart palpitations or whatever — all the signs of anxiety. It’s just how you interpret them. It’s like stage fright. Some people interpret that as a bad thing. Other people interpret that as excitement. In some ways, it’s just taking those physiological things and having a different perspective on them.”

Remarkably, after nearly 20 years of working in Hollywood, she says she’s never been told 
to lose weight or fit a certain mold. “You hear stories from people who are so thin and fit, and they’ve been told to lose weight. I don’t even think about that stuff. I just focus on being healthy.” She and Jacob have invested in an organic aquaponic farm in Texas, with the aim of making fresh produce more readily available to people at every income level. Her focus is on the bigger picture, and after years of feeling like an awkward late bloomer, she says she finally feels her age. Well, almost. “When I was growing up, I always thought the world would get less bigoted, less racist, and people would be more open-minded. For a while, I thought that was happening, but it’s been very scary the last few years.” Nevertheless, her optimism isn’t shaken. “I really, truly believe that people are basically good in nature, and in the end, that prevails.”

Styling by fashion editor James Worthington DeMolet.

For more of Zooey Deschanel’s exclusive interview and photo shoot with Cosmopolitan, pick up the November 2016 issue on newsstands Oct. 11 or click here to subscribe to the digital edition!