Marling’s latest movie, The East, like Another Earth and Sound of My Voice (the two other films she has cowritten), explores the attraction and complications of life on the fringe. In The East she is a spy who infiltrates a group of eco-terrorists, led by a bohemian Charles Manson–esque character played by Alexander Skarsgård. “If I wasn’t an actor,” Marling said as she parked the car, “maybe I’d be an eco-terrorist.” She smiled. “We’ll see if the psychic knows that.”
Dressed in a New York–ish ensemble of opaque stockings, velvet slip-on shoes, and a loose black T-shirt dress topped by a simple white cotton coat, the 29-year-old actress looked distinctly out of place in Hollywood. She grew up all over America—her parents are real estate developers, and the family moved constantly. “As a child, I couldn’t invest all that much in people because I knew I’d be leaving,” Marling told me. “I would give myself different nicknames for each city: I was Zooey, Frannie, Lux, and so on.” She was always attracted to acting, but her parents encouraged a focus on academics, and Marling majored in economics and studio art at Georgetown. When she was a freshman, she met Mike Cahill and Zal Batmanglij, two seniors who were directing their own short films. After college, she and Cahill went to Havana for a year and made a documentary called Boxers and Ballerinas; she also spent a summer interning at Goldman Sachs in Manhattan, which came in handy years later when she played Richard Gere’s investment-banker daughter in Arbitrage. She started writing so that she could act: “I knew it was going to be very hard to become an actress. I wasn’t prepared to be Bikini Girl Number 3 or star in Return of the Chainsaw IV. Most of the storytelling in movies is by men, so I wanted to write complex narratives about women. Nothing terrified me more than acting—but fear can be very motivating.”
