On an unusually windy and rainy day in Los Angeles, the type of day when palm trees fall from the sky and the natives hibernate, Rashida Jones arrives on time for lunch in West Hollywood. Unfazed by the storm in the streets, she joins me at a table in the back of the restaurant and eagerly begins to answer my innocuous questions regarding her blossoming career. But I’m stuck. Frozen. This never happens to me.
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I’m flustered not by the fact that I’m about to have lunch with a beautiful and charismatic Harvard grad on the cusp of the coveted and so-called “next level,” but because I don’t know where to begin. With multiple movies on the horizon for 2011, a supporting role in one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2010 and the popular Parks and Recreation returning to NBC for another season, there’s so much going on with Jones that I truly do not know what to talk about first.
After ordering a tuna and hummus openfaced sandwich (which she muscles her way into sharing with me), I compose myself and we begin with how it nearly didn’t happen for her. Jones almost walked away from acting just as her career was about to take off. “For someone who was going to quit acting five years ago, this is all so unexpected,” she says. “I was probably going to go back to school, maybe get a degree in public policy or law.”
Rashida's Roles
Good thing she didn’t. We wouldn’t have gotten to see her quick wit on full display on The Office, or see her big-screen presence as a romantic lead in the comedy I Love You, Man. Had she listened to herself and given it all up, then who would have had those pivotal scenes in The Social Network opposite Jesse Eisenberg? “Actors really have so much less choice than people think they have,” says Jones. “I never thought I’d have a traditional career. There was nobody I looked at and thought, ‘I want that career,’ because I never thought it was a possibility for me because of the way I look, and the way I was brought up, and the way I came into the business. There was no precedent for me.”
Yet even without a Hollywood role model, you won’t hear stories about Jones’ late-night club hopping or whispers that she’s “famous just for being famous.” You won’t find her on a reality show either. “In a weird
way, I have a fantasy about moving to LA from somewhere else and starting my career with nothing,” says Jones, the daughter of music icon Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton (The Mod Squad). “Because no matter what I do with my life, everyone will always think I don’t deserve it and I got help getting there, so I have a fantasy of being fresh off the bus and coming here and just fucking ripping it up!”
