Zooey Deschanel interview: And this little piggy

WITH her cerulean eyes and playful style, Zooey Deschanel may be a cutie but she's still an odd size. She is neither the shape of a character actress, a rom-com martinet, nor an action movie robobabe.

Or to put it another way, she's not going to be cast in Transformers 3 any time soon. This is unlikely to trouble the lemur-eyed starlet because while Transformers 2 deconstructs at the box-office, Deschanel's upcoming film (500) Days Of Summer has won warm word of mouth since its debut at Sundance. Not that the 29-year-old actress is ready to believe the hype.

"I've been doing this for a long time," she says. "I've seen things hit and not hit and sometimes what you think is going to be big isn't – you never know."

In case you can't fit the person to the name – which is not an easy name to forget – Deschanel has been around for longer than you'd think. She was space cadet Trillian in The Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy, a deadpan department store elf who romanced Will Ferrell in Elf, and Jim Carrey's indie-spirited ideal woman in Yes Man. In The Good Girl she was the check-out girl who liked to make bizarre announcements over the store's Tannoy.

Her first big break came when Kate Hudson, with whom she went to school, was set to appear in the rock journalist memoir, Almost Famous, as the hero's music-loving older sister. But when Sweet Hereafter actress Sarah Polley dropped out, Hudson stepped in to replace her and Deschanel was shuffled up the cast list. Newcomer Hudson was nominated for an Oscar and Deschanel's bossy big sister act – she gave her brother all her rock albums with instructions not just on what albums to listen to, but also where and how – earned her attention. Even then, aged 21, she took the interest in her stride, because Deschanel was raised as part of a Hollywood dynasty.

Her father is Oscar-nominated cinematographer and director Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, Being There, The Patriot), her mother, Mary Jo, is an actress (Twin Peaks), and her older sister, Emily, is the star of TV series Bones. Her first boyfriend was actor Jason Schwartzman, nephew of Francis Coppola and Nicolas Cage's cousin.

"It was nice to know what I was getting myself into," she says of her show-business background. She was barely two when she first babytalked her own decision to become an "actwess".

"My nursery school did a production of The Three Little Pigs,'' she says. "I played the third pig. When the wolf knocked on my door, I refused to get up and answer it because, to me, he was knocking the wrong way. I just lay there, snoring away on stage, fully immersed in my character. My dad turned to my mom and said: 'Dustin Hoffman'."

None of the Deschanels have worked together. "It could happen," says the youngest member. "But my dad ends up doing like six month epics and most of the stuff I do is smaller than that. And it might be a little hard if there was like a love scene. It would be kind of awkward with my dad, you know"

In her family the household gods were not so much Spielberg and Spelling as Tarkovsky and Salinger. Hence "Zooey", after JD Salinger's Franny & Zooey. Deschanel says the correct pronunciation should rhyme with "doughy". Maybe we should fact-check that with Salinger? "I don't really care what Salinger says about my name," she declares friskily. "It's my name."

She says she spent her childhood "on location". The family lived wherever their father was filming, from Yugoslavia to the Seychelles. "I hated it at the time, I was miserable," she says. "If you're eight and you live in Los Angeles and everybody has toys and you go to a country that has a Marxist dictatorship and there are no toy stores and nobody speaks English and it's blazing hot every day and they only have fish, which you don't like, then you tend not to appreciate the cultural lessons you're learning." However, there is some affection for the few months she spent in London: "At least it was a city, and they had toy stores there."

Deschanel may end up doing more travelling if (500) Days Of Summer catches fire. In it Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a lovesick greeting card designer. Deschanel is his new love-averse office colleague Summer, and their zigzag 500-day courtship is imparted in frisky out-of-sequence flashcards and a soundtrack that aims to change lives via heartbreaking songs with yearning melodies and dark-haired girls armed with acoustic guitars. One of them is Deschanel herself, who performs a cover of The Smiths' 'Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want'.

It's not always good news when an actor exhibits musical tendencies. For every Shirley MacLaine, there is a David Hasselhoff or a Keanu Reeves and Dogstar, but Deschanel has a pretty good track record. She won Will Ferrell with her a cappella rendition of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' in Elf, and played Casey Affleck's cabaret singing wife in The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford. She was also chosen over Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears to play the coveted role of Janis Joplin in the movie The Gospel According To Janis, although this project is currently on hold.

More recently, she teamed up with indie rock musician Matt Ward, who goes by the name M Ward. Their first CD, called She And Him Volume 1, featured her original songs and a couple of covers, fondly homaging the lovelorn laments of Patsy Cline, Peggy Lee, and girl groups like The Shirelles and The Ronettes.

"In the car, my mother always listened to a lot of Everly Brothers and Linda Ronstadt," says Deschanel. "Sixties music is my favourite era. I love The Beatles and The Zombies and The Kinks and a lot of those British groups."

At the beginning of the year, Deschanel announced her engagement to Ben Gibbard, frontman of the band Death Cab For Cutie, and once they tie the knot, she and Gibbard might follow Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher and blog their relationship.

"There was a fake Twitterer of Ben, and it was so silly because it was all stuff like, 'I can't sleep!'" she says. "I was like, 'Really? You can't think of anything better to do than to pretend to be someone else on Twitter and say you can't sleep? Come on, guy!'"

(500) Days of Summer is out later this year