Zooey Deschanel loves being the ‘New Girl,’ but laughs at her ‘it girl’ status

Zooey Deschanel has earned a new level of fame with her Fox hit New Girl, but the 32-year-old is still the quirky girl she’s always been.

The actress reveals in the new issue of Allure Magazine that she was bullied in middle school where “girls spit in my face” and made her “cry every day.” Once she got to college, though, she realized it was because people didn’t understand her “specialness.”

"I went to Northwestern [University] because I had gone to a really nontraditional high school. I was like, 'It'd be cool to have a traditional college experience,'" Deschanel explained. "Then I was like, 'Oh, but none of these people understand what's cool about me. My specialness is not appreciated in this place.'"

Where it was appreciated, however, was the acting world. She has starred in such films as Almost Famous, Elf, 500 Days of Summer, among others and considers herself “the outsider who's on the inside."

She explains her most recent role in New Girl is her favorite, since it's most closely like herself.

"Because I have brown hair and a low voice, I would get cast as dry, sarcastic, ironic people, which I can do, but it's not my sense of humor,” she explained of why she loves playing Jess. “I'm a very positive person. I get excited easily, and I like to jump around."

Deschanel may be a New Girl, but there’s one thing she doesn’t consider herself: the new “it girl” of young Hollywood.

The actress says she finds being considered an “it girl” funny.

"'It' girl is supposed to be something that only lasts a certain amount of time," she says. "They keep calling me an 'It' girl, and at this point it makes me laugh, because they've done that so many times: 'You're it'; 'you're not it.' What is 'it'?"