Sophie Zucker: ‘You don't have to always cast me as the loud Jewish girl’

As the furore about Bradley Cooper’s nose dominates the conversation surrounding the actor/director’s depiction of Leonard Bernstein, New Yorker Sophie Zucker has a thing or two to say about who is allowed to represent Jewish characters and tell Jewish stories.

Her one-woman musical comedy Sophie Sucks Face, in which her on-stage alter ego falls for an Israeli cousin who turns up to her grandfather’s shivah, is also a timely, between-the-lines commentary on the seemingly inexhaustible “Jewface” issue.

It is certainly a subject that has popped up in Zucker’s career. As an actor, she appeared in Amazon Prime’s The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, a show that has had its critics for casting Rachel Brosnahan, a non-Jewish actor, in the Jewish title role.

And as the youngest comedy writer ever to work for The Daily Show, a job that Zucker started in January at the age of 29, the roll-call of special-guest hosts includes comedian Sarah Silverman, one of the most outspoken critics of Hollywood’s “Jewface” problem.

“I think Rachel Brosnahan is so talented, but if they had cast it even five years later I don’t think that would have happened,” says Zucker, before adding with mock-vanity “but they do cast other Jewish people!”

Thank God for tokenism I hear myself saying. “Exactly!” laughs Zucker, who has also appeared as Abby in the Apple TV+ comedy period drama series Dickinson.

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Sophie Zucker (Photo: Copyright unknown)

On the subject of Jews and casting, she agrees with Silverman. “Hollywood is so bad at casting Jewish people in Jewish roles and so happy to cast non-Jewish people in Jewish roles. And that would be OK if they were also casting Jewish people in non-Jewish roles,” says Zucker.

“But sometimes, as a Jewish actor who looks very Jewish, and I say this in my show, I’m like, how can you tell me that my face is niche? It’s just a face. I can play the best friend or I can play the ingenue or the villain or whatever. I don’t have to play the loud Jewish girl.

"I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to transcend a little bit of that. But I do feel a lot of the time when I go for roles that I don’t look like what their idea of a neutral character is. I look too Jewish for that and I’ve sometimes missed out on roles for it.”

Zucker admits to being particularly miffed (not her word) about non-Jews building careers on Jewish roles.

She doesn’t want to “throw anyone under the bus” by naming names but there is one particular actor she has in mind.

“She has played a lot of Jewish roles in her career and has kind of built [her career] off of it. She’s having a really big moment right now, and she’s not Jewish. That feels bad and weird.”

As a performer, however, Zucker doesn’t feel the need to put her Jewishness front and centre of her act. But with identity so often now the defining characteristic of performers, why, I ask, would she be reluctant at putting her centre stage in the way so many other minority performers do?

“I think about this a fair amount so here’s what I’ll say,” she announces, as if checking first that I’m sitting comfortably before she begins. “I am pretty Jewish.

"My parents [both lawyers] are on the Upper West Side. I’m in such a Jewish space I really do not experience antisemitism in my daily life.

"I grew up going to Hebrew school twice a week, I had a bat mitzvah and I’m currently an involved member of my synagogue. [But] it always felt like such a personal thing. I don’t want to be an influencer. It is not me as a person that I want people to pay attention to.

“I want people to pay attention to what I make.”

This is not to say that identity is absent from Zucker’s work. But it’s in an old-school kind of way.

For example, she cites 1990s American sitcom called The Nanny, in which Fran Drescher plays a working-class Jewish girl from Queens, as an inspiration. Drescher’s character gets a job looking after the children of a rich Wasp family.