Zoey Deutch Recalls Backstage Broadway Memories with Mom Lea Thompson: 'I Would Help Her Do Her Makeup' (Exclusive)

For Zoey Deutch, starring in the new Broadway revival of ‘Our Town’ is a full-circle moment

“There’s nothing more spectacular than seeing a great play,” says Zoey Deutch.

The actress is now living the spectacle eight times a week as Emily Webb in Broadway’s Our Town, director Kenny Leon’s star-studded revival of the classic Thornton Wilder drama. For Deutch, it’s a full-circle debut: watching her mother, Lea Thompson, perform in the 2000 revival of Cabaret is what inspired her to pursue acting.

“My mother did [Cabaret] on Broadway and I lived with her when she was doing it,” Deutch, 29, tells PEOPLE. “I would help her do her makeup.”

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Of course, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s award-winning depiction of pre-WWII Weimar Germany wasn’t entirely suitable for Deutch at her young age. “I just basically lived in her dressing room and I wasn't allowed to see the second act,” she recalls. “So I'd sneak out of her dressing room and try to watch it.”

Now on Broadway herself, she adds, “That was very much a formative memory for me of knowing, ‘Wow, I want to do this.’ And I loved that show, even though I was way too young.”

Thompson, now 63, was a replacement in the lead role of Kit Kat Klub performer Sally Bowles — a character that inspired Deutch as much as her mother did. “That was ingrained in my brain,” she says. “God, I would love to play that part.”

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Our Town, which opened Thursday, Oct. 10 and costars Jim Parsons, Katie Holmes and Ephraim Sykes, is also full-circle for Deutch in that it’s her favorite piece of theater. “Things really do happen the way that they're supposed to because this being my first foray into this world is the dream scenario,” she says with a smile. 

“I'm having the time of my life,” adds the Something from Tiffany's producer-star. “They say that TV is a writer's medium, movies are a director's medium, and theater is an actor's medium and it's true. And it's fun.”

Most of the fun comes from Deutch’s castmates; Our Town features a whopping 28 actors, which she calls “a loving community… I'm just taking the opportunity to sit in all the different parts of theater and watch everybody move through their scenes and learn from them because it really is extremely helpful to observe their expertise and their experience.”

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And Deutch is learning anew from the late Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning dialogue. “It's a real gift to live in the words because it sinks into your real life,” she says. “The whole play is about time and [how] we never get enough of it. And to smell the roses and to burn the nice candle and look at your family and say, ‘I love you’ to your mom and enjoy the time that you have.”

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Unlike on other projects, “I’m living in that space and carrying it over into my life,” she adds. “A lot of the times [actors] work hard not to bring that stuff back into our lives. You leave it at work, especially if you're playing a darker character or it's a more intense piece. But this one, it's the opposite. I'm inviting it into my world as much as I possibly can.”

Our Town is now playing at the Barrymore Theatre. Another, Tony-winning revival of Cabaret, currently starring Adam Lambert and Auli'i Cravalho, opened at the August Wilson Theatre in April.

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