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By H. Alan Scott
Senior Editor
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It’s certainly not news to anybody that the state of movie theaters is not great. To get people to go see a movie, any movie, is very difficult these days. In fact, so many of the recent big rom-coms to have come out lately have been on Netflix. Films like Always Be My Maybe, People We Meet on Vacation, Set It Up, Your Place or Mine and, most recently, Jennifer Lopez’s Office Romance have all been hits for the streaming giant. And now they’re adding another favorite to the queue, Voicemails for Isabelle, starring Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson.
Deutch plays Jill, mourning the loss of her sister, whose phone number gets transferred to Wes, played by Robinson. To cope, Jill leaves lengthy voicemails for her sister, leading to the most tech-friendly meet-cute in film history.
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Sitting down with the pair, it was clear Netflix is the only place this story could have landed. “It’s really hard right now to get original IP made without it being a very small, low-budget movie,” Deutch told Newsweek. “And for them to believe in Leah’s vision [director Leah McKendrick] and to put us in it, I’m really grateful that they [Netflix] do that because I love these movies, and I know how much people love them.”
Robinson agreed, calling Netflix “such a populist platform” where “everybody has a Netflix account.” “‘Netflix and chill’ is sort of designed for a movie that you can watch at home and be comfortable and enjoy, laugh and cry,” he said.
That tonal balance—funny and devastating within the same scene—is what makes the film stand out from a crowded genre. “I love that, yes, it’s very romantic and funny, laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s heartfelt and deep and pulls at your heartstrings,” Deutch said. Deutch credited McKendrick, saying, “I think Leah did a really great job of modulating all that and finding the right tone.” Robinson called it less a typical rom-com and more a story about how grief and love intersect, noting “it is a love story between Jill and Isabelle just as much as it is between Jill and Wes.”
Turns out neither actor loves a voicemail any more than the rest of us. “Anytime my mom calls me, and if I don’t pick up she texts me—we have a rule—she has to text me after saying everything’s OK, because I’m always afraid something’s not OK,” Deutch admitted. Robinson’s anxiety runs more professional. “I think a voicemail stresses me out because it’s usually a work- related thing, so that’s what I associate it with.”
Even the film’s most romantic beat came from chaos. Deutch revealed that the rain scene, a standard of any great rom-com, actually wasn’t planned. “That was real rain...it was good for the movie but it wasn’t great for the car stunt,” she said, joking the “rom-com gods” were looking down on them. Robinson added that the movie still delivers every staple of the genre, “the running in the rain, the dance sequence,” while keeping McKendrick’s own unique voice intact.
With theatrical rom-coms nearly extinct, Netflix isn’t just filling a gap. It’s building a genre’s new home, one voicemail at a time.
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