Zazie Beetz, the actress from Atlanta and Joker who now leads Nocturne

Zazie Beetz

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 1, 1991 Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Joker, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train
Awards	Women in Film Max Mara Face of the Future

Some actors make a scene feel lived in rather than staged, and for most of the past decade Zazie Beetz has done that for stories that belonged to someone else. In Atlanta she was Van, the mother of Earn’s daughter, keeping a life together that his schemes kept putting at risk. In the Deadpool sequel she was Domino, the mercenary whose only power is luck. In Joker she was the neighbor Arthur Fleck builds an imaginary romance around. Critics kept singling her out, and the films kept being about the men beside her.

This year the arrangement changed. She led a studio horror film for the first time, played a teacher in Gore Verbinski‘s return to features, and on Friday Apple TV premieres Nocturne, a crime series she has carried as star and executive producer since it was still a project on paper. What remains open is whether audiences will follow her name to a story of her own.

Zazie Olivia Beetz was born in Berlin on June 1, 1991. Her father, Thomas Beetz, is a German cabinet maker who moved to the United States in 1990, after the fall of the Wall; her mother is an African-American social worker from New York. Her first name comes from Raymond Queneau’s novel Zazie dans le métro, and the soft s in its pronunciation comes from the German dub of Louis Malle’s film adaptation.

She went to preschool in Berlin and kindergarten in New York before the family settled in Manhattan’s Washington Heights when she was eight, speaking German and English at home. Her mixed-race identity, she has said, was a source of discomfort when she was young. Acting arrived through the Muscota New School and community stages, then LaGuardia High School, from which she graduated in 2009. At Skidmore College she took a degree in French in 2013 and spent a year living in Paris. Afterwards she waited tables in New York between small parts in films such as Applesauce.

Donald Glover’s Atlanta changed that. The FX series premiered in 2016 and ran four seasons until 2022, and Van grew from girlfriend role into one of its most complicated characters: an early episode, Glover’s first as director, follows her alone through a botched drug test at the school where she teaches. The part earned her a Primetime Emmy nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series in 2018. She also joined Joe Swanberg’s Netflix anthology Easy.

Hollywood moved quickly. After Geostorm came Deadpool 2 in 2018, directed by David Leitch, with Ryan Reynolds; Leitch later cast her again as the assassin known as the Hornet in Bullet Train (2022), opposite Brad Pitt. In 2019 Todd Phillips gave her Sophie Dumond in Joker, a role that brought a Saturn Award nomination. Around the blockbusters she chose directors with distinct ideas: Steven Soderbergh‘s High Flying Bird, shot on an iPhone for Netflix; Noah Hawley’s Lucy in the Sky; Edson Oda’s Nine Days, opposite Winston Duke; and Jeymes Samuel’s Western The Harder They Fall (2021), where she played Stagecoach Mary. Soderbergh brought her back as a postal inspector in the Max series Full Circle (2023). Her voice carries two long runs as well: Amber Bennett in Invincible since 2021, and Diane Foxington, the fox governor with a criminal past, in The Bad Guys (2022) and The Bad Guys 2 (2025). In 2021 Women in Film gave her its Max Mara Face of the Future Award.

The pattern has a cost. When she was cast as Domino, part of the comics audience reacted with abuse about her skin and her natural hair; Beetz said at the time that she was surprised to get the role, since she looked so little like the character on the page, and that she understood why some fans felt detached. The X-Force film that was supposed to give Domino more room never happened. In Joker, Sophie’s romance is revealed as a fantasy in Arthur’s head, and Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) gave her only a brief return. She is cast for how alive she is on screen, then written as an accessory. And when 2026 finally put her name first, the market did not answer: They Will Kill You opened to about $5 million in the United States against tracking of up to $10 million and finished near $19 million worldwide on a $20 million budget, while Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die took $9.7 million on the same budget. Neither number is a verdict on her own work; even cool reviews credited her.

Those films still show where she wants to go. In January she appeared in Andre Gaines’s The Dutchman, a new version of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman, opposite André Holland and Kate Mara. In February came Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, a satire about a man from the future fighting a rogue artificial intelligence, with Sam Rockwell; she plays Janet, a teacher besieged by phone-hypnotized students. In March, Kirill Sokolov’s They Will Kill You, the first film from Andy and Barbara Muschietti’s company Nocturna, cast her as Asia Reaves, an ex-convict who takes a maid’s job in a Manhattan high-rise run by a Satanic cult to rescue her younger sister, with Patricia Arquette and Myha’la.

Nocturne is the bigger bet. Apple TV announced it in 2023 under the title Lazarus, with Beetz attached as star and executive producer; the series is based on the Joona Linna novels by Lars Kepler. She plays FBI agent Saga Bauer, the surrogate daughter of Liev Schreiber‘s retired detective, sent to confront the imprisoned serial killer Jurek Walter, played by Stephen Graham. Filmed around Pittsburgh in 2025, it has drawn early reviews that are largely favorable. The first two of ten episodes arrive on October 30, 2026, with new episodes every Friday until the finale on December 25.

She produces through Sleepy Poppy, the company she runs with the actor David Rysdahl, her partner since they met at an acting workshop in 2014 and her writing partner; the two married in 2023 and both serve as executive producers on Nocturne. At the series’ New York premiere on October 20, 2026, Beetz revealed that she is expecting their first child.

Still ahead is Kockroach, Matt Ross’s adaptation of William Lashner’s crime novel, shot in Sydney this spring with Chris Hemsworth and Taron Egerton and still without a release date. Before that, ten Fridays of Nocturne will show whether the actress who made so many other people’s stories feel real can make an audience stay for her own.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Steven Soderbergh, Zazie Beetz, joker, atlanta, Nocturne

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