Zoe Kazan Wants You to Put Your Phone Down for East of Eden

When John Steinbeck was writing East of Eden, he handwrote the manuscript on the right-hand pages of large, custom ledger books, saving the left-hand pages for daily letters to his editor and friend, Pascal Covici. Early on, Zoe Kazan tells W, he promised “a monster unlike any you’ve ever seen.” That monster was Cathy Ames, the beautiful, remorseless woman who marries into the Trask family, shoots her husband, abandons her newborn twins, and goes on to run a brothel in Salinas, California.

“She’s so arresting, so shocking, singular, fascinating, and mysterious,” Kazan says, “and I think she was that to Steinbeck, too.” As his writing went on, Steinbeck’s letters about Cathy softened. “He would start to say things like, ‘I can't wait to get back to my dear Cathy. I think we all have a little monster blood in us, and maybe I am a monster too,’” Kazan says.

Kazan structured her adaptation of East of Eden around that shift. Her seven-episode limited series premieres on Netflix October 1, moving Cathy from the book’s dark periphery to its center. She wrote the character with one actor in mind: Florence Pugh, who stars alongside Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask, Mike Faist as Charles Trask, Hoon Lee as Lee, and Joseph Zada and Joe Anders as the Trask twins.

Kazan wrote all seven episodes and co-ran the show with Jeb Stuart; it’s source material she’s been close to her entire life. Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the Academy Award-winning 1955 film starring James Dean.

“I feel like I’ve been borrowing the book, and now it’s time to return it to the library,” she says. “It’s surreal that I’ve worked on this for six years and thought about it for 20 years before that, and someone could binge it all in seven hours.”

A week before the premiere, Kazan spoke with W from London about finding Cathy’s humanity in the text, working with Pugh, and why her East of Eden is anything but homework:

Cathy has usually been read as the book’s villain, not its center. How did you approach her differently?

For me, Cathy is central. I used the letters [Steinbeck] wrote to his editor as a guidepost. Late in his writing process, he would say things like, “People will hate [Cathy] not because she is foreign, but because she is familiar.” He was wrestling with the good and bad inside of himself, and I see that bifurcated into Cathy and Adam in the book. Where I differ from him, maybe, is that coming to this material as a woman, as a person who grew up in a body that was sexualized and targeted, I read some of her experiences differently than he does. And yet it was very important to me to find textual support for everything I was doing. Any places I imagined a little beyond the page, I needed a doorway to walk through that felt accurate to the book and its intentions.

How did you find that doorway with the scene from her childhood?

In the book, it’s described as her having staged a sexual assault with two boys. She wouldn’t speak afterward, and once she did, no one believed her, and she was angry not to be believed. I cannot help but read it a little differently than Steinbeck’s intention. Much later in the book, she recalls how, as a child, when she was frightened or alone, she would imagine that she was with Alice in Wonderland drinking this potion and shrinking down. When I came to that as an adult woman, having been through lots of therapy, I was like, “Oh, that’s a portrait of dissociation.”

It was very important to me to never excuse anything she was doing, but rather to say, “These are all human beings and human beings have terrible things happen to them. What do you do with it?” If we think of Cathy as being not human, then we don’t learn anything about ourselves.

Some viewers will see this as a feminist telling of East of Eden—what do you think?

Whether or not I’m writing something that is explicitly feminist, I’m always coming from that viewpoint. That said, I don’t think Cathy Ames is a feminist. Maybe Lee is, but the way that we conceive of feminism now is completely different from how these characters would’ve thought it. Steinbeck is being profoundly humanist, and sometimes the moment he was writing in, which was a moment of great racism and misogyny, put a limit on his humanism. I was trying to honor his impulse rather than the moment he was writing in.

Why was Florence Pugh the only actor for the role of Cathy?

Midsommar was the first time I saw her on screen, and I paused the movie after the first 10 minutes because I had to recover. I remember being a kid and hearing Karl Malden, who was very dear to me, talk about seeing Brando on stage for the first time and how it erased any jealousy. That’s how I felt about Florence. Cathy’s such a challenging role, and I needed an actor who was going to be able to reach out with as much empathy as I was, without judgment, but at the same time without softening all of that character’s edges.

Cathy goes through a lot in the series, and there are some pretty graphic sex scenes, some more traumatic than others. How did you handle those?

When we first approached Florence, I was very clear that this is a person who becomes a sex worker. It was important to me that when we were shooting the scenes of her work, the men are sort of faceless. I wanted to put it on screen as work, not as an objectification of her body or something scintillating.

This material is intimately tied to your family’s story. What has it meant to you to put your own twist on it?

I’m 43, and one of the ways that I’ve coped with having this enormous family legacy was by trying to ignore it, both the good and the bad, and trying to think of myself as completely separate. A decade ago, I wrote to my agents and said, “This is so embarrassing, but if the rights to East of Eden ever come up, can you put my name forward? I know what I would do with it.” Even to get to that point, I had to agree with myself that my love for this book was bigger than my fear and shame about stepping further into my grandfather’s shadow. Over the last six years, I’ve become brave enough to make this, and I’m so proud of the process. The whole time, I walked around feeling like this is the thing I was put on this earth to do.

There’s been a real trend of adapting great works of fiction for the screen lately. How do you feel about introducing East of Eden to a new generation?

To a person who hasn’t read this book, this is not an eating-your-spinach experience. This was a piece of popular entertainment. When it came out, it got ravaged by critics; it was not high fiction. We’ve gotten this idea as a culture that a period drama or a classic work of art isn’t as much fun as watching Love Is Blind. I would love for people to go into the first couple of episodes and give it a chance. This is something you need to put your phone down for, but there’s a lot of fun to be had.