Zazie Beetz On Saying Farewell To The Coolest Character In ‘Atlanta’
“You know, Donald and Hiro, their sort of mantras are like we can always ruin this show,” Zazie Beetz says smiling through her screen. The actor is sitting in what must be her lovely lit room as she talks over Zoom about the looming final season of Atlanta .
Content warning: This article contains minor spoilers for season 4 of Atlanta.
It’s 2022, and there’s enough TV shows streaming online that one could indulge themselves every night of the week, and still have something to watch for the rest of their life. High school dramas are overflowing; exploitative true crimes haven’t been cancelled yet; diverse stories are overtaking and revered.
For Zazie it’s a Monday night in New York City, as she starts to tell us about the last six years playing Van — her character in the Emmy award-winning series Atlanta: a show where one episode can follow a character simply trying to get a haircut, to then an entire episode set on a talk show. A show that has continued to remain true to its genre-bending form amidst a competitive content market.
“They got to keep it fresh and keep us on our toes and remain engaged and keyed in with the world and what we’re trying to make. So yeah I feel very lucky,” Zazie told Junkee, talking about the masterminds Donald Glover and Hiro Murai behind the FX series which has frequently featured on top TV lists ever since its debut in 2016.
Image courtesy of FX and Disney
That’s when we first met rapper Paper Boi (Brain Tyree Henry), cousin/manager Earn (Glover), friend Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and of course, Earn’s ex Van. Beetz, along with her relatively unknown co-stars, are all household names in the industry now thanks to Atlanta. Beetz has landed roles in films like Deadpool 2, Joker and the recent Bullet Train. Impressively, Atlanta recently came in at number 9 on the Rolling Stones‘ Top 100 best TV shows of all time.
All Things Van
By now there’s been over 40 threads of emails with Zazie’s PR team, endless hours spent binge-watching the latest episodes, and suddenly only 20 minutes to talk about all things Van; who had their “big moment” in the series during the last episode of Season 3.
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“That’s where I felt, really the honour of playing Van in Season 3,” Zazie reflects. For the first two seasons Van is the provider, but when she temporarily loses that role she kind of has nothing to anchor herself with besides being a mother, which traps her as well, Zazie explains.
By the finale, Van is living in France with her chef boyfriend who serves hands — yes, human hands — at his restaurant, her daughter Lottie is nowhere to be found, and she resembles a real-life Amélie. “She really just is like fuck of all of you, I can’t fulfil those expectations,” Zazie says.
“My job isn’t to become the best actress in the world. My job is to do the best I can that day.”
According to Atlanta writer Stefani Robinson (who writes most of Van’s episodes), audiences should’ve seen Van’s descent into chaos coming all along. Zazie definitely did. It was a big episode to film for the actor, especially to feel she could take risks in her performance. “We had worked together already for a while, we had already sort of this trust built in, and so I felt all right, I’m kind of ready to take a risk and fly,” she recalls.
Comparing the process to filming the first ever episode as Van, Zazie says: “I don’t think I really would’ve been able to take the same risks that I took. I used to be so paralysed with fear a lot of the time, which was really painful”. In fact, it has taken the actor a long time to come to terms with how to deal with her anxiety around acting. “My job isn’t to become the best actress in the world. My job is to do the best I can that day”.
Subverting Expectations
Zazie is also used to being cast as someone who is quite an earthen and grounded, which she puts down to how the world must perceive her. Playing a Black female character, who can often be portrayed on screen as one-dimensional, Zazie persists that despite the labels of “black women” or “single women”, we all contain multitudes within all of those identities. “For Donald and Hiro and the whole team to trust me to have an arc like that with Van, meant a lot to me,” she smiles.
And while the show is unapologetically American, Zazie is not surprised that the show has resonated with fans in Australia. Commonwealth countries have similar histories in terms of colonialism, and so naturally “there is an overlap of the minority versus majority experience,” she says.
Rather than being hassled for her alter ego’s french accent in that finale episode — which she says she purposefully didn’t try to nail — Zazie tells Junkee that fans still come up to her on the street asking how Van could ever leave her daughter and disappear overseas.
“That’s like a huge response I get online. A huge response I get when I am on the street…confusion of how a mother could do that,” she reveals. “I don’t judge Van at all, but maybe because I play her, that’s my job.”
Zazie pauses then exclaims, “my parents sent me off every year for two months”, alluding to her visits to Berlin — where she was born — to stay with her grandparents. The actor can actually speak German, a flex that even gets a cameo in an Atlanta episode.
A Soulful Ending
So far audiences have been rewarded with six new episodes in Season 4 — Van is soul-crushingly only in two of them so far. Her and Earn have been lost in an Atlantic Station with all their exes, giving viewers hope that their relationship might finally be in a really healthy place. Van and her daughter Lottie have even been TV extras for a director Mr. Chocolate (Glover in disguise again).
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For all the characters, apparently we can expect more exploration of their identities in the latest and final season. Alfred’s relationship with his music and the industry, Earn’s relationship with that too but also his family, Darius with his ethereal element to the show — and finally Van as a partner and her own identity and what she wants for her future. This season is very soulful, Zazie reveals.
“I don’t judge Van at all, but maybe because I play her, that’s my job.”
But how does one sum up the legacy of Atlanta, as it nears its end? Of Van? Of Earn, Paper Boi, or Darius?
Zazie brings up the first time she read Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions — a book that inspired her to start writing, she says, because it completely undid what she thought the structure of a novel needed to be.
“I realised you can write literally whatever you want, however you want it. There are no rules for anything. That’s creativity,” she says, just like in Season 3 of Atlanta, when creators totally ignored the main plot and followed totally separate storylines, like with episodes ‘Trini 2 De Bone’ and ‘The Big Payback’.
“It’s a reminder that creativity has no rules and as long as you’re touching on something truthful, people generally respond,” Zazie says. “It doesn’t have to be in any of these formats that we have decided are the correct format. For me that’s a big part of the show’s legacy.”
Perhaps we won’t get closure or any neat bows tied around arguably the best characters in TV, but that’s Altanta‘s usual surrealist style anyway and so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Atlanta season 4 is streaming on SBS on Demand.
Claire Keenan (she/her) is a Senior Producer for Junkee. She is on Twitter.