Zoey Deutch carves her own path in Hollywood

LOS ANGELES >> To say actress Zoey Deutch is a regular at Art’s Deli is an understatement. Sporting an oversized sweatshirt, she breezes into the restaurant, a Studio City institution since 1957, and is immediately greeted with familiar hugs from the wait staff. One chimes in that he’s known her since she was a baby.

“I do all my interviews here, I do all my meetings here, I do all my dates here,” Deutch laughs. “There’s a lot of ground covered at this deli.”

Deutch grew up not too far away from the spot with her movie business parents. Her dad is “Pretty in Pink” director Howie Deutch and her mom, actress and ‘80s dream girl Lea Thompson. They fell for each other on the set of the high school rom-com “Some Kind of Wonderful” and have stayed together since.

At 22, Deutch, is looking to make a name for herself in the business separate from her insider parents. She’s been acting professionally since age 15, transitioning from Disney shows to young adult genre fare, some of which are better regarded (“Beautiful Creatures”) than others (“Vampire Academy”), and now more adult roles. Earlier this year, she was paired opposite James Franco, 16 years her senior, in the studio comedy “Why Him,” and last year played the wise female lead in the otherwise testosterone fueled Richard Linklater indie “Everybody Wants Some!!”

Her latest, “Before I Fall,” out Friday, is a dark Groundhog Day-like portrait of a popular teenager forced to relive the last day of her life over and over again. The film explores subjects like bullying, peer pressure and how to be a decent person in the world within conventions of a psychological thriller.

“She’s the real thing,” said “Before I Fall” director Ry Russo-Young. “The girl has serious chops.”

Deutch is someone who admittedly likes to take control of things, even outside of the duties of “actor.” “Before I Fall,” for instance, was a $3 million movie that didn’t have much of a wardrobe budget, so she found herself calling in favors to make sure they had all the necessary duplicates to work for the time loop construct. Recently, too, she put on a public relations hat to tell the folks at a morning talk show where she was a guest that there’d be no running a clip from her new film of a car crash first thing in the morning, “right before people get in the car!”