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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Dawn breaks under rainfall in Kramatorsk, a Ukrainian stronghold under Russian threat on the eastern front. What makes it harder for drones to fly becomes an opportunity for Russian infantry to try to gain ground. These are, in any case, small skirmishes. EL PAÍS reports this from a military command post in Kramatorsk based on images captured by drones on October 15. The front line shows hardly any change and the war is stuck in a complex tangle as the fifth anniversary of the full-scale invasion approaches. Kyiv has also recently suffered serious setbacks: at home, with attacks across around 20 of its regions, and internationally, the blow represented by the United States’ overt alignment with Russia.

Beyond the Kremlin’s imperial posturing, decisions in boardrooms and on international markets are also pushing Ukraine further away from a just and lasting peace — the kind frequently discussed in diplomatic forums and meetings. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused his allies of not doing enough, especially after several ballistic missile attacks on his country last week about which Kyiv was not warned, as often happens. Behind this is published reporting that the United States could stop sharing intelligence with Kyiv. Added to that was a partial outage of Starlink, Elon Musk’s company, whose terminals are essential to the Ukrainian military, in what Zelenskiy called a “planned operation.”

Zelenskiy does not hide the fact that he feels betrayed by U.S. President Donald Trump at a time when relations between them have again soured. The U.S. and Russian leaders recently signed an agreement to release hundreds of thousands of barrels of diesel despite sanctions on Moscow. Beyond his outrage, Zelenskiy cannot openly confront Washington despite Trump’s repeated slights — whether because of the latter’s closeness to Vladimir Putin or because of the way the Republican belittles him and Ukraine. On October 17, responding to journalists via WhatsApp, he said he expected new meetings with U.S. negotiators to try again for an energy truce. But he is clear that Putin “wants our destruction. Surrender is not enough for him.”

Zelenskiy, in any case, is trying to keep his composure. After the U.S. president’s announcement of an “energy ceasefire” on October 11 — which never really existed because Moscow rejected it — Kyiv resumed strikes on Russian refineries. That further irritated Trump in a kind of vicious circle. “We Ukrainians have dignity,” Zelenskiy said on October 16 in Brussels. In a jab at the Republican magnate, he praised Europeans as “real leaders” who have stood by Ukraine “from the very beginning of this war.”

Meanwhile, ordinary citizens are bearing the brunt. Life in the country’s major cities, such as Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, the second-largest city, remains disrupted by constant attacks that local air defenses fail to repel. Cuts to basic services are commonplace and nothing suggests conditions will improve.

Moscow’s main objective now is to shut off water, electricity, and gas as a new winter approaches. The attempt to ensure that attacks would spare energy infrastructure was nothing more than a mirage that few believed in when, as on previous occasions, Trump’s empty diplomatic gestures came to nothing at the first sign of trouble.

Bad weather, good weather

From a bunker in Kramatorsk filled with screens where Ukrainian troops watch the battle unfold in real time, orders are issued to those on the ground. Sitting in a chair like those used for long hours of gaming and wearing a tracksuit, Roman, a 42-year-old deputy battalion commander, admits his country is having a hard time.

He enlisted shortly after Moscow launched a military operation in 2014 to occupy part of Ukraine’s Donbas region, a precursor to the blow of the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Adverse weather hampers drones, he explains, but “helps Russian infantry to advance on land. This weather is ultimately worse because the Russians have more personnel and resources than we do and we cannot push them back. They move slowly, but they move,” he says.

In four months it will be five years since the Kremlin launched its invasion. A trip through different regions of eastern and southern Ukraine is a reality check that helps explain the pessimism and fatigue among the population, although each person views the conflict through their own lens. The number of bombed gas stations keeps growing, as do the miles of roads and streets covered with netting to try to blunt the impact of Russian drones. There are stretches in Kherson, in the south, where there is evidence of Russian airstrikes almost every 50 meters — some with the wreckage of a vehicle nearby — that underline the measure’s limited usefulness and how they barely stop the smallest devices.

Not far from there, in the village of Sahaidachne, Natalia leads a crew of half a dozen women busy harvesting potatoes. The 42-year-old spent seven months under Russian occupation in Zmiivka on the banks of the Dnipro River. She recalls that there they had everything needed for a decent life — working the land and even with young people still in the town. In November 2022, after Ukrainian forces expelled the occupiers from the area, she ended up settled in this new village. “We don’t have money to move again,” she says resignedly, despite a recent incident when a drone landed next to the house where she now lives with her husband. She believes Moscow should return all occupied territory to Kyiv.

A little farther north, in Nyva Trudova, a small village in the Dnipropetrovsk region, three workers from an agricultural and livestock company share dinner. The oldest, Oleksi, 60, does not hide his hostility toward Zelenskiy, whom he considers “corrupt,” like those around him. He thinks Ukraine will not recover the roughly 20% of the country that Russia still occupies. For that reason, he believes a peace deal should be signed now and that Moscow should keep that territory, because otherwise, he says, it will continue to gain more ground.

Against the noise from Washington, Kyiv’s allies — especially in the European Union — have been unable to impose sanctions on Moscow that would prevent the military aggression from reaching its current extent. Zelenskiy conducts frequent rounds of talks and constant foreign visits, such as last week’s trips to London and Brussels, but Kyiv still lacks the weaponry and financing required to stop Moscow’s offensive, particularly its ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones. All this is unfolding amid an expanding hybrid war deployed by the Kremlin, whose tentacles increasingly reach across Europe.

In the underground command center in Kramatorsk, Roman puffs on an electronic cigarette as he recounts that during nighttime operations Russians camouflage themselves with special clothing so they are not detected from the air as heat sources. In the background, despite the rain, artillery thunders and air-raid sirens go off in the streets. On one of the televisions, the soldier shows footage captured that very morning by the camera of one of those unmanned aerial vehicles as it drops its bomb on an invading soldier trying to advance his position in the area. Minutes later, another device — this one classified as a surveillance drone — confirms the death. But it’s just one.

These unmanned systems have become the main protagonists of the armament revolution this conflict represents for both sides. Some are small, flying only a few thousand meters and carrying a kilo of explosives, while others have ranges and speeds that are difficult to counter. New drones — increasingly sophisticated alongside ballistic missiles and aerial bombs — allow Moscow to extend the front line and keep all of Ukraine permanently on edge. At the same time, surprising advances in Ukrainian industry, despite having less funding and resources, allow Kyiv to strike targets over 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) inside enemy territory.

Underground, Roman, despite the small trickle of Russian uniforms visible from the drones, knows there are thousands still trying to advance and take Kramatorsk, increasingly destroyed and deserted. This city is the largest under Kyiv’s authority in Donetsk region, of which Russia occupies about 70%. Putin will not renounce it. For that reason, Roman and the others fear that, as with Bakhmut and other nearby towns, Kramatorsk could end up falling.

Meanwhile, Natalia continues working in her potato field. She says her dog is unfazed by Ukrainian drones but hides when they are Russian. That gives this woman peace of mind and confidence. She says she has an official certificate of internal displacement but has not received from the government the money due to her after losing her home. She opens her phone and shows it, destroyed. “Why do we deserve this war?” she asks.

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Sitting in the suite of an upmarket hotel with an iced latte in hand, Paul Banks (Essex, 48) shows few visible aftereffects of the intoxicated lifestyle that nearly sent him to the other side. The Interpol singer looks happy in middle age. His band, which shone in early-2000s New York amid the post-punk revival, is now enjoying a second youth, lifted up by a generation that once again reveres the archetype of the tormented indie figure à la Ian Curtis, with whom Banks has long been compared.

He is in Madrid to present This Mirror Weighs a Ton, the band’s eighth album. He knows the city well. He lived in the Spanish capital from the ages of 11 to 16. He still has friends and visits them every time he comes. He says he fell in love with Madrid and learned that, with time and the right attitude, he could live anywhere. “When I got here I was on a BMX and playing basketball. I left at 16, but by then we were drinking, smoking and going to clubs and stuff. The last moments of pure happiness and the first moments of adulthood were in Madrid.”

He grew up with skaters in the downtown Plaza de Colón because his father, an automotive executive, came to Madrid for a job at Volkswagen. Later the family moved to Mexico and then to New Jersey. “When you talk to people who talk about having families and moving around a lot, I think a lot of people frame it from a negative standpoint, you know, maybe the child won’t be able to develop roots or have a sense of home. The way it worked for me was sort of on the contrary: I think it allowed me to just be a citizen of the world with no notions of one thing being above another and that every place has its charms.”

Banks studied literature in New York. It was the era of rock’s rebirth, with bands such as The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Rapture, and LCD Soundsystem. In 1997 he joined Daniel Kessler, Carlos Dengler and Greg Drudy to form Interpol. Five years later, with Sam Fogarino replacing Drudy, they debuted with Turn On the Bright Lights, a key album of that scene. But as Interpol grew commercially, its members began to show signs of wear. In 2010, Dengler left the group. For Banks, those years were marked by substance use. He says he quit when he realized he wouldn’t last much longer on that road. “I was open about the fact that I was getting to the point where I think I was getting close to mortal situations. And then I just went to get treatment.”

He moved to New Jersey, to a house that was far from the bars and clubs and from some of his friends, whom he didn’t see again for a long time. “If you say, okay, this table’s my life and I’m going to move the beer over there to the far side of the table, that’s not going to work if you’re trying to stop drinking. It has to be off the table. Once something is genuinely off the table, there’s not really that much left to do. It was hard; I had to go through a major chemical rebalance, and I think I went into some pretty profound depressions at the time. I couldn’t quit cigarettes for a long time after that. But the drugs and alcohol wasn’t that hard because it was time and I was just ready for it.”

Despite everything, he has fond memories of that year and a half of recovery, during which he exercised a lot and threw himself into music. “[In 2013] I did this crazy mixtape called Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be. I don’t know if you know about it; it’s only on YouTube. It was just something I did for fun. I learned to use Logic [a music-production program], and it was the first time I realized, oh, I could write with horns or trumpets or trombones. I can create any sounds I want. It was pure creativity at a time when I really needed it.”

Like many artists who get used to creating under the influence, Banks needed time to discover he could do it sober. “I’ve never felt that booze or weed — and I do smoke weed still — is somehow helping the creation. You’re telling yourself that it’s this sort of ceremonial preamble to the process of creation. So you can do without them and instead sit for a few minutes and quietly tell yourself you’re going to channel your creativity and try to make something beautiful.”

He changed his lifestyle and found in surfing and boxing two activities to fill the “void of excitement” drugs had once provided. While standing on a board in the middle of the ocean he applied the same principle he used to stop drinking. “There’s not really a middle ground because anything in the middle, you can just keep leaning into panic and then just fucking slide that way. If you’re on a surfboard and you start thinking, ‘What if there’s a shark?’ It can become overwhelming. Instead you have to realize: ‘I’m not on the menu; I’m sure the universe is not upset with me for being out in the ocean on this non-polluting floating object.’ So if the universe wants a shark to get confused and come bite me, then what am I gonna fucking do about it?”

The end of the process culminated in the birth of his two children, who have changed how he works and conceives his career. “I think about what I’d want my son to think: Not so much would he like these lyrics, but would he like the effort that I’m making? Would he admire the sort of commitment to my craft? I think that becoming a father fully activated my soul. It’s not that the love you normally feel goes from a ten to an eleven. It’s something else. It’s like a room that you didn’t know was in your house, and now you discover this room, and someone turns the light on, and now there’s this extra space, and that’s how it feels emotionally.”

At the end of the interview he takes out his phone and proudly shows a photo of his children. They don’t yet know their father’s story, but one day they will. Is he worried about what they might think of him? “Do you mean because some of the themes are a bit weird, or that they’re sort of dark? I’ve thought about that. But from what I’ve heard from other artists who talk about their kids, they don’t care much who their parents are in the art world. Robert Downey Jr. will talk about his kids watching The Avengers, but they don’t care that dad is Iron Man: they like Thor. You just want to make sure that it doesn’t get in the way of any part of their life or that it doesn’t impact them negatively.”

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