Zoe Kazan on Honoring Steinbeck’s ‘East of Eden’ for Netflix Series While Rethinking Its Characters

Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what stayed, changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.

When Zoe Kazan was working on adapting John Steinbeck’s acclaimed novel East of Eden, she recalls being asked the same question: Why not begin with Cathy?

Cathy Ames, the novel’s most intriguing and menacing figure, would seem like the obvious hook for the Netflix series. But Kazan, who created and wrote the seven-episode adaptation, says the answer didn’t come to her until the edit.

“She interrupts this love story,” Kazan tells The Hollywood Reporter, “and if we don’t establish that love story to start between these two brothers, we don’t understand the stakes of her interrupting it.”

That realization became one of many while crafting a series on a book that spans 50 years and stretches across the country but that Kazan insists is built on the characters, rather than spectacle. She told every department head, from costumes to hair, that the work of their show would succeed only if audiences left talking about the characters.

“If people walk away from this talking about the costumes and the wigs, we haven’t done our job,” she tells THR. “We need people to walk away from us talking about these people, like they know them as if they are their own families.”

She credits her cast, including stars Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist and Florence Pugh, with helping her see even more to these novel‘s characters. “By watching Chris and Mike interact, I understood how much these characters loved each other,” she says.

Steinbeck’s East of Eden has been a personal staple in Kazan’s life. She first read the book at 15, immediately impacted by the story and characters. “There are just certain books that hit you so hard,” she says, also naming Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby as others that did the same.

The most obvious personal connection to the story is Kazan‘s own grandfather, Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film adaptation that starred James Dean, Raymond Massey, Richard Davalo, Jo Van Fleet and Julie Harris.

“In the process of bringing this family saga to life, the resonance of my own familial connection to the material has not been lost on me,” Kazan said in a statement when the series was announced. “But it is Steinbeck’s writing — personal, shocking, profound and free — that has kept me enthralled to East of Eden since I first read the book as a young teen.“

When she watched the film, Kazan admits to THR she felt the things she loved from the novel were missing: Cathy Ames, the “intergenerational aspect of the story,” the story’s exploration of “how patterns recur and chains get broken, why change is possible in a family and why it’s so hard,” as well as characters Lee and Samuel Hamilton.

“None of that was in the 1955 film. If it had been, I never would have made this,” she tells THR. “Even at 15, long before I thought I could be the person to do it, I felt that somebody had to put onscreen the thing I see in my head.”

For 20 years, Kazan says she “walked around with that feeling” of wanting to tell the story again. Things changed when she became a young mother. “I had to face the fact that if I wanted to keep writing, I was going to have to pay someone to watch my child. I asked myself what was worth that money, that person’s time and being away from my child? So I wrote to my agents and said, ‘I know this is embarrassing, but if the rights to East of Eden ever come up, please put me forward as a writer. I think I know what I would do with it.'”

A year and a half later, Kazan says she got a text: “Do you want to go in and pitch?”

In a departure from her grandfather, Kazan says she was only interested in pursuing adapting the novel as a series, though acknowledging even with seven episodes, not everything from the book could be covered.

“The film takes on a small part of the story for very good reasons. The story is so big that even with seven episodes, seven hours, half of the book isn’t in our series,” she explains.

Her intent on the adaptation, which she describes as something that showcases an “advanced form of reading,” was to offer “a more novelistic approach.” The goal was to give a “dive deep into these characters, spend time with the different parts of the book, explore their humanity and tell the story over time.”

“You could only do that in a series,” she says. She compares her focus on characters to how she played as a child: “I would do two weeks of pre-production,” she says, planning who her Barbies were and how they were connected. “That is what is dreamy about writing a series. You get to spend a lot of time with character, and characters are the engine of the plot.”

As for the characters, who Kazan says are real people to her, she gained new perspectives on them years after being introduced to them through the novel.

Cathy Ames may have been Kazan’s entry point to the book, but she says it was one of the biggest surprises. In writing her for the series, Kazan realized Cathy, despite her deceptions, is almost always telling the truth.

“She is absolutely deceptive in so many ways, but she is almost always saying something that is true,” she says of Cathy, who is portrayed by Florence Pugh. “I felt like I had never read anyone like her.“

That insight shaped how Kazan read the novel’s passages about Cathy’s childhood and her own experience informed her reading. “I grew up in a body that was sexualized and targeted from a very young age,” she says, “and I cannot help but read that differently than I think he intended.” She describes the Alice in Wonderland imagery Steinbeck uses for Cathy as a child as “a portrait of dissociation,” and she says she took those passages as context for the character rather than as a simple backstory. “That paired with this description of this rape that she is described as not speaking afterwards, and then when she accuses these boys, her parents don’t believe her. That was all context, and especially paired with this realization that I had, that Cathy is so often telling the truth.“

“I understand that not everybody is going to read it like that,” she adds, “but given my own life experience, I cannot help but read it like that.”

Series co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stuart told THR, “Worldwide, you look at headlines: Women’s rights are always under attack. Do women have any more agency now than they did at Cathy’s time? These are debatable things. I have two adult daughters. This is something I grew up thinking about, worrying about, so I would think of Cathy as being sort of a bellwether, not necessarily as a role model but as somebody you look at and you say I understand why that’s going on.“

Kazan praises Pugh’s performance as “extraordinary.” “That’s why you cast an actor like that,” she adds.

“Each role that I come to, it’s the same process. I need to get to know the character. I need to fall in love with her. And I need to figure out why she is the way that she is,“ Pugh said of her approach to taking on the role of Cathy.

Abbott’s Adam Trask was a character that was “mysterious” to her when first reading the book, but one she gained a new understanding of. “It took me a long time to realize his passivity is a choice. He’s trying to hold on to a dream of perfection, a dream of what would make his life happy. If he doesn’t move on from Cathy, he can perpetuate that dream and his process of accepting reality is the journey of his life,” she says.

“I’ve never gotten to age that much in a character before,“ Abbott told THR at the East of Eden premiere. “It was cool to take those steps and play a whole life lived. I’ve never gotten to do that in this way before. You embody a character in a different way when you do that.“

Other characters that took on new meaning for Kazan while writing included Lee (portrayed by Hoon Lee) and Aron (Joe Anders).

“Lee was a character I had enormous curiosity about,” she reflects. “He has a privacy, and I felt he was keeping secrets even from Steinbeck. I wanted to respect that privacy but also open the door a little further. My understanding of Lee increased a thousandfold when I became a parent. He became a point of identification for me: This man shows up to parent these boys every single day, and now that I’m a mother I understand the cost and the labor of that.”

The first time Kazan read Steinbeck’s novel she thought the character Aron was “really annoying” but someone she grew to love. “As I wrote him, I thought, I know what it’s like to be a person who feels they have to be perfect in order to be loved. I started to understand the burden on him, and I wanted to bring that empathy to bear. None of this is revolutionary. It’s the reason most dramatists want to be dramatists: to explore human nature. I find all these characters incredibly rich.”

Zoe Phillips’ Abra is someone who didn’t get to have “as much real estate as she gets in the book,” Kazan says. “But I love our actress, who brought a real sensuality to her, which I loved.”

Steinbeck’s novel may have been published in 1952 but the story is one that transcends generations. However, reframing the values of the time was also important.

“I was always trying to come from fidelity to the book and curiosity about Steinbeck’s intention, and then go a little further in places where I felt he was mired in the politics or values of his time in a way that wasn’t helpful to telling the story,” Kazan says.

“There’s so much in the novel that feels shockingly contemporary,” she says. She points to the novel’s code-switching scene between Lee and Sam Hamilton, which the actor who plays Lee read at his audition. He told her he thought she had made it up. “I thought this was a 2020s perspective,” she recalls him saying. But moments like that, she notes, sit alongside “incredibly racist descriptions of Lee’s face.”

As for what the book can highlight for modern times, Kazan notes how Lee says that “even Cain, with his filth and his murder of his brother, still has a choice.”

She adds, “That’s an important idea for us to take up and hold onto, not just as individuals but as a society, and to use as permission to reexamine our own actions and histories. There’s a beautiful, generous invitation in this material: You don’t have to be cowed by shame over what you’ve done or what people have done to you or what your country or family has done. And at the same time, you must contend with that past, or you cannot change. That’s such a beautiful idea and really worthwhile for today.”

Stuart told THR, “I think these are things that are just as relevant today as they are in the 19th century. I don’t think you have to look very far. One of the things that Zoe and I talked about is we wanted people to go away from this thinking not how great somebody’s hairdo is and it looks so authentic for the 19th century but that could be my sister. That could be my brother. I know who that person is. It’s very relatable. We hope that’s what audiences take away from a period piece like this: not how accurate we were but how relatable we are.“

“Zoe is clearly very interested in re-lensing this story through a modern context and all of the things that we have come to know more deeply about human psychology and the dynamics of people who are subject to discrimination, whether that be subject to gender, race, heredity, birth, all of these issues live in the book,“ Lee told THR at the East of Eden premiere. “I do feel like it would be a very dangerous trap to try to recreate a 1950 world in this story. We run the risk of it feeling irrelevant to us or immediately dated, etc. When you’re in the world of a book, each individual reader is creating that world and they will create a world that’s as rich or as spare as they want to create it. So when the obligation with a show is to choose the perspective that we’re going to present and to do that with strength and with boldness and I think that’s exactly what she’s done.“

Kazan’s East of Eden series, which premiered on Netflix on Oct. 1, is another classic novel to get the adaptation treatment this year with other works including Sense and Sensibility, The Odyssey, Wuthering Heights and A Tale of Two Cities.

Though the creator prefaces that it’s important to “keep telling new stories,” there is “a beautiful continuum between us and the past“ which is perhaps why these stories keep returning.

“Looking backward and forward at the same time is a profound part of what makes us human. Tony Kushner put it at the end of Harper’s last speech in Angels in America: Perestroika: ‘In this world, there is a kind of painful progress, longing for what we’ve left behind and dreaming ahead.’“

“I carry that with me,“ she says.

Ultimately, Kazan hopes that viewers who engage with her series feel inspired to return to Steinbeck’s original pages and find a love and appreciation for it the way she did at a young age.

“I truly believe there’s something in this book for everyone,” she notes. “I couldn’t fit it all into our adaptation, so there’s so much treasure left for a reader to explore on their own. If people’s takeaway from this series is ‘I want more,’ and they go to the book, I’ll feel so good.”