In this summer’s comedy Our Idiot Brother, there is a hot lesbian make-out scene between Rashida Jones and Zooey Deschanel. This is very likely to be the only fact you will remember from this article. There will be several more facts to come—in due course, we might touch upon Jones’s Harvard degree, her volunteer work with Michelle Obama, her celebrity parents… But after a spoiler alert like that, the rest of this stuff is bound to read the way Charlie Brown’s teacher talks. So perhaps this is a good time to slip in some caveats. To begin with, the make-out scene in question occurs at the family dinner table (not, alas, on the dinner table), and the table is filled with relatives, including one slightly panic-stricken mother. Most distractingly, Jones is wearing a pair of ginormous eyeglasses that look like something a Brooklyn graphic designer swiped off the Unabomber’s face. And yet. Chalk it up to the limitless capacity for the male mind to block out distracting mise-en-scène, but the sequence is still pretty hot. For Jones, it was a personal milestone of another kind: “I feel like I’ve come a long way from my first job, when I had to get mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from Rip Torn.â€
In this age of Webby, Jezebel-y mud fights about pretty girls, funny girls, and who belongs inside that supposedly slender portion of the Venn diagram where they intersect, Jones is a rare consensus figure. She is tremendously undislikable. Partly that’s because, at 35, she’s been semifamous for only a few years, meaning she’d had the time to become an actual person first (this despite being the offspring of two very famous parents, Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton). And partly because she has that gift of looking amusingly bemused or agreeably agitated, which comes in handy given the all-star comic ensembles in which she finds herself with staggering regularity. “A question I get asked a lot is ‘What is it like to play the straight guy all the time?’ And I’m totally okay with it,†she says. “I’ll never be the person doing a cartwheel and landing with my skirt over my head. That’s just not who I am.†Her job on Parks and Recreation, which just wrapped up a breakthrough third season, is to provide an occasionally flustered, frequently perplexed center of gravity for the local government lunatics in her orbit. “Every week,†she says, “someone on that show will tickle me in a new and fun way. Wow, that sounds really bad. Please put that next to a topless picture of me in GQ.†Done.
