Zooey And Emily Deschanel Haven't Always Got Along As Sisters
"Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters," George Clooney's aunt, Rosemary Clooney, sang in the iconic holiday movie "White Christmas." Nice sentiment, but definitely not always the case for siblings, especially when you're the younger one like Zooey Deschanel is to Emily Deschanel. The two sisters get on like gangbusters these days, but Emily and Zooey haven't always been close.
Zooey and Emily come from entertainment royalty. Their father is the five-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, and their mom is actor Mary Jo Deschanel. Caleb opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about his daughters' career choices. He said Zooey was set on acting from the moment she could talk. But Emily preferred architecture over treading the boards. That all changed after she entered a theater program at Boston University.
Still, both sisters were comfortable performing in front of audiences from a young age. "Since they were 12 or 13, [they would] get up in front of 2,000 people and not feel nervous," Caleb said. "If I got up in front of so many people, I'd just melt. But both of them really love doing it — and not necessarily for all the [trappings of] success, even though that helps them do the things that they want to do. But for the process of pretending to do things." With so much in common, you'd think they'd have always been tight. But Zooey opened up in a 2012 interview about why she and Emily Deschanel haven't always got along as sisters.
The torturer and the tormented
Emily Deschanel is four years older than Zooey Deschanel, which is scarcely an age gap when you're 20-something, but it's a lot when just you're a little kid. And it was something Emily used to her advantage to torture her little sister. "When I was 3, she was 7, and she was already evil. She basically just used the plot of 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' to terrify me," Zooey said (via US Weekly). "I was terrified," she continued.
Emily admitted to Conan O'Brien that she loved to torment Zooey. "It was just the two of us, and I was the older sister, and we would fight all the time, but then, I would kind of play mental games with her," she said. "My favorite one was I would tell her I was from Neptune, that I was a Neptunian, that I'd killed her sister and taken over her body, and that I was going to kill her next."
However, the transformation of Zooey from toddler to teen evened the playing field and enabled her to grab back control from her sister. "She's very possessive about her things," Emily told Queen Latifah. "Growing up, I was never allowed to wear her clothes ... she had signs on her door ... 'Do not enter this room, Emily,' and she had a boombox that she had like a paragraph on 'Under no circumstances is anyone allowed to touch this boombox ever. That means you, Emily Deschanel.'"
Sisters and moms
Zooey and Emily Deschanel have become tight as they've grown older, especially since becoming moms. Per People, Emily and her husband, David Hornsby, share two sons, Henry and Calvin Hornsby. Meanwhile, Zooey and her ex-husband Jacob Pechenik have a daughter, Elsie Otter, and a son Charlie Wolf. US Weekly reports that after the couple split in 2019, Zooey began dating "Property Brothers" star Jonathan Scott.
The sisters can now unite to terrify their own kids — albeit unintentionally. Zooey told Jimmy Kimmel about a Disneyland trip resulting in a nightmare. "We were like, 'It's going to be so exciting,'" Zooey said about them heading to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride without thinking about how scary it could be for young kids. "As soon as we were in the boat and we go out on that Bayou with the guy playing 'Deliverance,' I was like, 'Oh my God! This was a terrible mistake!'" But when they plummeted down the famous drop, things really took a turn for the worse. "They were clinging to us the entire time," Zooey admitted.
Meanwhile, the acting siblings collaborated on screen after Zooey guest-starred on her sister's long-running show "Bones" in 2009. "We have been trying to get her on the show for a long time," Emily said during a "Bones spoiler" interview. "But she's a busy lady, so it's been hard to get her to actually be in it ... I didn't believe it was going to actually happen until it really did."