Zoe Kazan's Real Name: Zoe Kazan

Quick answer: The actress and playwright is documented as Zoe Kazan. A 2012 Guardian profile describes her as Los Angeles-born and New York-based, and as the writer and star of Ruby Sparks. A 2017 Variety interview independently lists her birthplace as Los Angeles and discusses later work including The Big Sick (The Guardian; Variety).

Real name and early life

She is known professionally as Zoe Kazan. Fuller names sometimes listed in databases are not used in the Guardian or Variety accounts cited here, and are not repeated in the title. The Guardian calls her Los Angeles-born and New York-based, the granddaughter of the director Elia Kazan, and says her parents are both screenwriters. Variety independently treats her as both a film performer and a playwright working from New York. Variety independently lists the birthplace as Los Angeles and an alma mater of Yale, and records a Broadway debut in 2008 in Come Back, Little Sheba. The Guardian, writing in 2012, gives her age as 29, and Variety, writing in 2017, gives her age as 34; those ages are not converted here into an unsourced exact birth date.

Career highlights

The Guardian focuses on Ruby Sparks, which Kazan wrote and in which she plays the title role, an idealized girlfriend imagined by a novelist; the paper also notes that she was in London to promote the film's UK opening. Variety, five years later, discusses her work in the summer hit The Big Sick and a role in the then-buzzy HBO series The Deuce, and notes that her play After the Blast was starting performances at LCT3 on October 7 of that year. That later interview, which also lists her as New York-based and records the 2008 Broadway debut in Come Back, Little Sheba, therefore extends the career past the Ruby Sparks moment described by the Guardian. The Guardian additionally identifies Elia Kazan as the director of On the Waterfront and says he died when she was 20.

Name notes for searchers

Zoe Kazan is the documented professional name in both sources cited here. Searchers looking for the writer and star of Ruby Sparks, a Big Sick credit, or later stage work such as After the Blast are usually aiming at the same person.