New drama imagines US as Nazi state

Zoe Kazan stars in a new drama set in a time that imagines Charles Lindbergh leading the country into anti-Semitism in 1940.

Zoe Kazan is acting royalty in Hollywood. The daughter of screenwriters Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha), and granddaughter of director Elia Kazan (On the Waterfront), Kazan has a wide range of film credits to her name.

These include Fracture, Revolutionary Road, The Big Sick and Ruby Sparks, which she co-wrote and in which she co-starred with her partner, Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood).

The 36-year-old’s new, six-part series, The Plot Against America , is based on the 2004 Philip Roth book that imagines Franklin D Roosevelt being defeated in the 1940 US presidential election by pilot Charles Lindbergh, who then moves the country into mainstream anti-Semitism.

What interested you about this project?

Zoe Kazan: When I heard I was being offered the part, I quickly read the book and was amazed by its passion. The Plot Against America is an extraordinary piece of fantasy. It’s set in New Jersey against the backdrop of a fictional timeline of the United States in which Charles Lindbergh ushers in antiSemitism after becoming US president. I think Roth wrote the book in reaction to George W Bush being elected and to 9/11. He was responding to what he was seeing at that time. It also speaks so much to the moment we’re having right now, so it’s very relevant. Describe your character

I play Bess Levin, who was a sort of fictionalised version of Philip Roth’s mother, Bess Roth. Roth has a sweet spot for his mother even though he is very hard on his father in The Plot Against America. I felt like part of my job was to embody all of the qualities that Roth saw in his mother but look really from inside of her perspective to make her not this domestic goddess but someone with blood running in her veins who was a real worrier and flawed but someone he worshipped regardless. Did becoming a mother help you play the role?

I got this role in November 2018 and I had just given birth to my daughter in the fall of that year, so this was my first job as a mother. It was an extraordinary experience for me to play this wonderful mother and grapple with all the things she was grappling with as I learned how to mother my own child. I feel like I learned something profound about how to be a mother.

Do you and Paul share parenting duties?

My partner is an unbelievable co-parent and he went to work first when she was born. I have been working ever since and he has done all of the things you would ask your partner to do, being there for both of us. It’s still very hard to balance the lives of two artists who are also parents but millions of working parents do it so we can, too.

How was it growing up with such an amazing, artistic family?

I was raised in an embarrassment of artistic riches. My parents would tape old movies off the television and also rent movies from the local store which specialised in old movies. One of my earliest memories was watching Claudette Colbert diving off that yacht in the film It Happened One Night .Iwas shown a lot of black-and-white films in that vein and my first screen crushes were Gregory Peck and Humphrey Bogart. My parents didn’t want us being advertised to, so we didn’t watch TV in my house other than Sesame Street. Instead, I got an amazing film education which I’m very grateful to have had.

– Jenny Cooney, TV Guide

The Plot Against America screens on SoHo at 9.30pm Tuesdays and is streaming on Neon.