‘It changed my life’: How Atlanta helped Zazie Beetz conquer the world

Zazie Beetz sees her life in two halves: before and after Atlanta. “I think of the show really as the project that changed my life,” she says.

Before the 31-year-old actor was cast in Donald Glover’s critically acclaimed, surrealist comedy-drama series, she was working a full-time job and “running around auditioning” on the side. After the show became a smash hit, Beetz landed starring roles in films like Joker, Deadpool 2 and this year’s Bullet Train.

Donald Glover as Earn Marks and Zazie Beetz as Van, in season four of Atlanta.Credit:Guy D’Alema/FX

Now, with the show currently airing its fourth and final season, Atlanta is set to go out as one of TV’s all-time greats. And for Beetz that means bidding farewell to the show that started her career. She is sad it’s ending, but happy to be going out on top.

“I think it’s really healthy to end on something that feels like a high,” Beetz says.

Atlanta has been a hit since it debuted in 2016. It recently placed at number nine in Rolling Stone’s list of the best TV shows of all time, a couple of spots behind Mad Men and ahead of Succession. But it’s changed a great deal since then too.

The series began as an exploration of two cousins, Earn (Glover) and Alfred (Brian Tyree Henry), trying to make it in the rap industry in the titular US city. Beetz played Van, Glover’s ex-girlfriend and mother to their daughter Lottie. But by season three, Atlanta had evolved into a hugely ambitious surrealist work.

Rather than following a traditional linear narrative, many of the more recent episodes have been bottle efforts that did not feature the main cast. But the throughline has always been explorations of race and blackness in America.

In one episode, based on a real story, a white couple neglect their black foster children to tragic ends. In another, a landmark lawsuit allows black Americans to sue the white descendants of slave owners for reparations. But these weighty topics are always handled with humour – take, for instance, Chet Hanks’ cameo as a white man who speaks in Patois because he was raised by a Trinidadian nanny, in a perfect art-imitates-life send-up.

Despite its laser focus on America’s fractured foundations, Beetz is not surprised that Atlanta has found a cult following abroad, including in Australia.

“I suppose ultimately, the core of [the show] is the minority experience in a majority world, and every country really has some type of story around that,” she says. “Particularly, if I think of the UK, Australia or Canada, countries that … all have a similar history with colonialism.”

Amid the standalone episodes, season three of Atlanta periodically dipped back into the story of Earn and Alfred. The finale saw Beetz take centre stage: beating a man bloody with a stale baguette and hosting a cannibal dinner party in Paris, before breaking down and admitting she felt trapped by her life in the US. It was the culmination of a season where Van had been AWOL in Europe after shirking her responsibility as a parent.

It’s an episode Beetz says “feels very characteristic of the show”, moving with ease between the absurd and affecting human stories. The discomfort with being boxed in by motherhood that underpinned Van’s season three arc is something Beetz feels seriously about. She sees the episode as spiritually akin to Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a book and subsequent film adaptation about a mother who (temporarily) abandons her children.

“If you struggle being a parent, you’re not a bad person, you’re just a person and everybody’s doing their best,” Beetz says.Credit:Matthias Clamer/FX

“I felt a lot for Van,” she says. “I think we paint parenthood to be like – well, you made this obligation and now you have to just stick it out, which of course is to some degree true. Your children didn’t ask to be here and so what do you owe them? But then ultimately, we’re all people first.

“If you struggle being a parent, you’re not a bad person, you’re just a person and everybody’s doing their best.”

Beetz can’t reveal where Van ends up at the end of the series, only that this season continues to explore the tension between her role as a parent and her as an individual. And she thinks the book is not completely closed on Atlanta.

“What I like about the show is that it feels so unconventional. I could see us revisiting it in the future and doing some type of one-episode special, so maybe I haven’t fully said goodbye. Right now I feel like, alright, it belongs to the world now. It doesn’t belong to us anymore. I just hope everybody loves it and enjoys it.”

The fourth and final season of Atlanta is airing now on SBS and SBS On Demand.

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