Zoey Deutch & Nick Robinson On Voicemails For Isabelle, A Grief-Filled Love Letter To Family

Voicemails for Isabelle is the latest rom-com to hit Netflix, but it’s not strictly all romance and comedy. A large part of this film is dedicated to grief and the journey that comes when you lose a loved one. With my dad currently fighting Stage 4 cancer, it had me sobbing on my couch as I grieved in advance. Voicemails for Isabelle follows Jill (Zoey Deutch) as she deals with the death of her best friend and sister, Isabelle (Ciara Bravo). As a way of coping, Jill leaves countless voicemails for Isabelle, the new number assigned to Wes’ (Nick Robinson) work phone. When I sat down with the cast and writer-director, I wanted to delve into how this theme of grief really hit home. Deutch says when she read the script, she was instantly touched. “I think [writer-director] Leah [McKendrick] did a really beautiful job navigating a very intense subject, and everybody deals with grief differently, of course, but when I read it, I felt that it was… a really beautiful portrayal of what it feels like to love someone so much and lose them,” the actor says. “It’s the heart of the film, the sister love story.”

Co-star Robinson agrees, adding that Jill’s capacity for grief informs her capacity for love. “They both kind of expand at the same time,” he says. “This isn’t a love story just as much between Jill and Isabelle as it is between Jill and Wes. I thought that was a really beautiful aspect to this whole story.”

When screenwriter-director McKendrick first wrote the script over eight years ago, she wasn’t writing from a place of experienced grief, but more from love. A big theme of Voicemails for Isabelle is how important non-romantic love is. Instead of being completely focused and consumed by romantic love, Jill found her soulmate in her sister, Izzy. “My sister is alive and well, she’s healthy, but it was really just inspired by her being my soulmate and wanting to write a love letter to sisterhood,” McKendrick says.

“We focus so much in our society on romantic love, and we say, ‘I haven’t found love’ or ‘I’m looking for love’, as though the only type of love that exists is romantic love.” The director says she’s experienced such deep, intimate love with her girlfriends and family, which is almost impossible to find in a romantic partner. “I feel deeply connected to my husband, but it’s different,” she explains. “When I die someday, I will know that I have lived a life of love, and one part of it was romantic love.”

McKendrick also hoped to subvert the classic rom-com genre with Voicemails for Isabelle, because familial love was the first type she’d encountered (as with most people). “The love of my life, that first true love that I experienced, was my little sister. When I first wrote [the script], I hadn’t found my person, and so it was more about belonging and the imagining of what it could be like to find true love in romantic love,” she says.

At the same time, the romance between Wes and Jill will have you giggling and kicking your feet. A key to the film working is the chemistry between the pair, which didn’t take long to establish. “Nick and I have known each other a while, since we were teens,” Deutch says. “So we’ve had a friendship, a history, and a foundation of time between us that I think really lends itself towards having that chemistry.”

The pair still had to do an official chemistry test at the Netflix office, but obviously passed it with flying colors. “I have so much love and respect for Nick… I don’t know how to artificially replicate that, I really don’t.” Robinson says he feels the same way about Deutch, and their friendship shines through as they speak about each other.

Deutch’s Netflix rom-com Set it Up has been hailed as one of the best modern rom-coms, and she really wants fans to embrace her new film. “[Voicemails for Isabelle is] a very different kind of movie. Set it Up leans much more into the comedy realm, and this leans much more into the drama realm, while also still having a lot of laugh-out-loud elements,” Deutch notes. “I hope they’ll love it, you know. I made it hoping they would.”

Voicemails for Isabelle is now streaming on Netflix.

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