Truth rating: 10
Zooey Deschanel
4:12 pm, August 5th, 2013
(Tesh/Marie Claire)
Zooey Deschanel opens up to Marie Claire for the September cover story, firing back at her haters and explaining what she thinks it’s important for young girls to learn.
The “New Girl” actress may make her living in front of the camera, but is shy in her personal life, revealing, “I get very overwhelmed by crowds, especially of strangers.”
But Deschanel is most uncomfortable with the haters who seem to criticize everything from her speech to her clothes.
“My theory is that people in this day and age want to dismiss things,” she says. “So they want to be able to dismiss you. They say, ‘You don’t belong, you don’t deserve this because here’s why, and let me find an intellectual argument for why you wearing pink or cuff sleeves or a bow makes you not worthy of your accomplishments. Everything you’ve done doesn’t matter because you wore the wrong thing or you speak in a way that’s feminine or you identify yourself as feminine.’”
Deschanel counters, “And I just think that’s bullsh*t. And smart people are doing it, and that’s surprising to me. I’ll give them being smart, but they’re being very shortsighted.”
“It’s just attacking who I am. A lot of times it doesn’t have to do with what I get paid to do,” she continues. “It has to do with, ‘Oh, you stupid person.’ Even I get slammed and overwhelmed by how negative the Internet can get, and I’m an adult.”
The actress adds, “I don’t pay any mind to it, but it’s pretty shocking how when you give people anonymity – it’s like the worst of human nature.”
Deschanel says, “I became aware that people were criticizing the way I speak, which seems weird to me. I speak the way I speak, and I am an intelligent person. Sometimes I lean into California-speak more for entertainment value. It’s not that I can’t live in a world without the word like.”
And it’s her independence that led the star to help create the site HelloGiggles.
“I just felt it’s important to teach young girls to be strong people, to not think, I can’t do this because I’m worried about what people will say,” explains Deschanel. “There are worse consequences, but online negativity stops people from being creative, part of which is having bad ideas as well as good ideas.”
She tells the magazine, “We can’t have the next generation be so afraid because they have been attacked.”
Marie Claire hits newsstands on August 13.
Follow @GossipCop on Twitter!
Like us on Facebook!
Sign up for Gossip Cop’s daily newsletter.
You might like:
