When she’s not raising kids, listening to her boyfriend say “So we decided to go with an open concept” at dinner (sorry — at every dinner), or maintaining her bangs like they were a bonsai tree, Zooey Deschanel is doing what she does better than anyone on this planet — sing like a perfect mixture of the princess and the frog. And though her band, She & Him, hasn’t put out an album since 2016, said album was called Christmas Party, which means in December they can tour and play Kimmel, like they did last night. And, well, it was nice. Where previously Deschanel’s singing was a pleasant surprise, now it’s just really pleasant.
Considering this, don’t you think she’d talk about Elf more? Like all the time? Like at least as often as Kate Winslet talks about Titanic or everyone who was in The Big Lebowski talks about The Big Lebowski? In the, as my colleague Nate Jones just put it on Slack like three minutes ago, “constant present tense of social media, [which] has erased most of the past from everyone’s memories, except for, like, 53 canonical projects,” doesn’t it seem like it would just come up. Especially, when you’re Zooey Deschanel, and you’re not unlike the titular Elf yourself, but instead of being raised in Santa’s workshop, you were raised in the backroom of Sunset Junction vintage shop. [Pulls suspender.] Now I’m not no big-city person who was in Elf, but if I were and I was promoting a non-album cycle Christmas tour, I think I’d ask Corden or Fallon if I could come on to re-create some scene (maybe not the one where she sings original-lyrics “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the shower while Will Ferrell listens in, which does. Not. Age. Well). Look, I get it, as artists you want to look forward, especially as you are in a semi-hiatus from acting as you wait for roles that are worth your time (especially especially in an age group as a woman that literally, actually makes Hollywood executives’ heads explode), and you don’t want to seem like you are clinging to past success. So, it’s less that Z.D. should talk about Elf more, just that she would. Hell, Jack Black talks about it as his favorite Christmas movie and (1) he wasn’t in it, and (2) he was in a different Christmas movie.
Maybe she doesn’t talk about it because she was blonde in it, so it feels like a different person. Not to mention that she didn’t like being blonde, telling Variety, “I had a meeting for ‘Elf’ while I was blonde, and I asked them if I could dye my hair back to brown. They said ‘No, we want you to look the way you did in your audition.’” Very cold of Jon Favreau, or should I say SCROOGE. Now doesn’t the fact that she talked about it in Variety disprove the thesis of this entire post. To which I respond, yes. Oops. But this does raise a new question: Was Zooey Deschanel the inspiration for Baby Yoda’s eyeball size?
