For the past two decades, Zoe Kazan, 43, has built a low-key career, moving between independent films and more ambitious projects. The former include Ruby Sparks (2012), a comedy she also wrote and produced. The latter include hits such as She Said (2022), in which she starred alongside Carey Mulligan as one of the New York Times reporters who exposed Harvey Weinstein’s abuses.
Now, all of that has been overshadowed by her work behind the camera as the creator, writer and executive producer of the Netflix miniseries everyone is talking about: East of Eden. Premiering on the platform on October 1, this new screen adaptation of John Steinbeck’s celebrated 1952 novel has had to withstand not only the scrutiny of critics and audiences, but also the cruelest test of all: comparison.
The daughter of screenwriters, Kazan is also the granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan, who made history in 1955 with the first film adaptation of the novel.
Seventy years after her paternal grandfather’s classic, Kazan has ventured her own version for a contemporary audience. Instead of a major theatrical release, she has delivered a seven-episode streaming series. And instead of casting an unknown James Dean (whose career was launched by the film) to tell only part of the story, she places Florence Pugh’s commanding presence at the center of a narrative her grandfather largely left unexplored. His adaptation focused solely on the final third of the novel, which the filmmaker once described as “the only part that is filmable.”
So far, the strong reviews for Kazan’s cast, with Christopher Abbott (Girls) and Mike Faist (Challengers) rounding out the central trio, have helped quiet critics who see the miniseries as a commercially driven project rather than a deeply considered reimagining of John Steinbeck’s novel.
As writer and showrunner, Kazan has made choices of her own, as different from her grandfather’s as the decades that separate their adaptations. While he chose to focus on the turmoil of a tormented Cal Trask (James Dean), whose convictions are as unstable as his sense of self, Kazan, who has long expressed an interest in the representation of women on screen, has shifted the emphasis toward the novel’s female perspective, giving the antiheroine Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh) a far more prominent role.
“I think it’s all dialectics,” she recently told GQ while discussing the release of East of Eden. “I think that there’s a strange balancing act that the book is doing between philosophy and plot, and between good and evil, and I think that in the movie there was just an overbalancing into the masculine aspects and the boy’s story, and Cathy, or Kate, was really relegated to being a side character.”
In an interview with Vulture, Kazan described how she discovered Steinbeck’s work at an early age, an interest she naturally shared with the rest of her family. By the age of 15, five years before Elia Kazan’s death in September 2003, she had already read East of Eden. Soon afterward, she told the publication, she traveled across California with her parents, screenwriters Nicholas Kazan and Robin Swicord, whose credits include Little Women, Matilda and Practical Magic. During the trip, she visited Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas and even stopped by his childhood home, which had since been turned into a restaurant.
By then, Steinbeck’s work had already become part of her DNA. After reading several film projects that attempted to adapt East of Eden, Kazan finally asked the question she seemed destined to ask: “If the rights to East of Eden ever come up, can you let me know? I’d really like to pitch on it,” she wrote to her agents.
In 2019, she finally got her answer. A production company had secured the rights to the novel and was looking for someone to adapt it into a series that would place greater emphasis on Cathy Ames: “You interested?”
Aside from a handful of roles that brought her within sight of Hollywood, including a part in Revolutionary Road (2008), Kazan chose the Broadway stage in her early years as an actress, appearing in a number of productions in the early 2000s.
Even then, her surname did not go unnoticed, and questions about her grandfather soon followed. Beyond proving that she was more than just another nepo baby, the actress also had to contend with a thorny family legacy. In 1952, her grandfather testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. At the height of the Red Scare, he named eight colleagues from the theater who, like him, had been members of the Communist Party in the 1930s.
In January 2020, during a panel discussion for the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, in which she starred, Kazan was asked about her grandfather’s actions during that period of U.S. history. Her response was as direct as it was candid.
She replied: “I have thought a lot about how the history of our country affected my family’s history, what it meant for my grandfather as an immigrant to this country to have his Americanness tested, and the choice that he made from that, and I [have] thought a lot about my own choices that I’ve made, the way that I choose to live my own life. I think ‘thou mayest’ choose a different life.”
In doing so, she alluded to some of the very ideas Steinbeck explored in East of Eden, where the biblical story of Cain and Abel serves as a recurring point of reference throughout the novel.
In the discussion, she suggested that Steinbeck chose to include this in his novel “about the foundation of the West” because “it’s also about America choosing to recognize who they have been — Cain did kill his brother — but also recognizing that they may choose a different future for themselves.”
As for the family she chose, Zoe Kazan has been in a relationship with fellow actor Paul Dano since 2007. The two starred together in Ruby Sparks (2012), in which he played a writer and she the perfect woman he creates on the page, only for her to mysteriously come to life.
Kazan and Dano met while working on the Off-Broadway play Things We Want, directed by Ethan Hawke. Since then, they have built one of Hollywood’s most enduring and private relationships. Though they have never married, they have two young children, a daughter born in 2018 and a son born in 2022. In 2025, they took them to New Zealand for seven months during the filming of East of Eden.
After the birth of her first child and around the release of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen Brothers’ film in which she starred, Kazan spoke to Vulture about her fiercely guarded private life.
“I think we value privacy partially because you’re trying to protect your creativity, and it has to come from somewhere personal. Having a private life is an incredible privilege, and must be protected in order to allow your unconscious to belong to you,” reflected the granddaughter of one of cinema’s greatest directors, aware that there are no easy answers.
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