‘Voicemails for Isabelle’ Star Zoey Deutch and Filmmaker on Forgiving Wes, Jill’s Grief and Rom-Com’s Magic: The Gathering Plot Twist

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “Voicemails for Isabelle,” now streaming on Netflix.

Netflix’s latest rom-com hit, “Voicemails for Isabelle,” landed on the streamer last Friday following nearly eight years of changes on its road to the screen, including screenwriter Leah McKendrick taking over as director. Among the biggest switches made to the script since stars Zoey Deutch (“Something From Tiffany’s”) and Nick Robinson (“Love, Simon”) first read it was a key factor in the overall plot: just how much Wes (Robinson) attempted to tell Jill (Deutch) he was receiving the intimate voicemails she was leaving for her late sister, Isabelle (Ciara Bravo).

It’s a rom-com mishap that leads to a meet-cute and an eventual happily ever after, but one that relied on the audience really believing Wes was not some monster who was using the situation (him being assigned Isabelle’s old phone number and Jill continuing to call and leave messages when he didn’t set up an outgoing message) to trick Jill into falling for him. To make that point very clear, writer and director McKendrick says she was inserting more moments indicating his good intentions throughout production on “Voicemails for Isabelle.”

“You know the scene where he’s in the bathroom and he’s like gonna tell her and then he comes out and he’s sitting on the couch and he says it, he’s like, ‘I’ve been getting your voicemails’ — and she’s asleep? That was something that was added super last minute,” McKendrick told Variety. “I was already in Vancouver, we were prepping, and it was really the studio being like, we need him to try to do the right thing; we need to see him try. I always had him texting, and then it not going through, and I think I had the service being lost at one point, where he did try to. And it’s a series of missed connections, so that you can hopefully see that his heart is in the right place, but it’s getting harder and harder and harder to do the right thing.”

But McKendrick attributes a considerable amount of the empathy the audience feels for Wes coming from the chemistry between Robinson and Deutch.

“I think a lot what helped us, more than anything, was casting Nick Robinson, because he’s so sincere and he’s so genuine,” McKendrick said. “As a human, he’s that heart open as well, that you would follow Nick Robinson anywhere.”

While Wes and Jill’s story is the central romance of “Voicemails for Isabelle,” it’s not the main love story. That award goes to the relationship between Jill and Isabelle, which is only shown on screen for the first few minutes of the film before Isabelle dies. Jill is left to keep their sisterhood alive on her own by adding new messages to their extensive catalogue of voicemails sent to each other over the course of their young lives, leading to the deep love Wes forms for her over her messy and real revelations about life.

“Jill’s little sister, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis when she was a child, led her to stay at home a lot of the time,” Deutch said. “And Jill moved out of her parents’ home, and the sisters developed a routine of leaving each other very long voicemails, narrating everything going on in their lives. And that was their way of communicating. And though you don’t get a lot of screen time between the two of them, that’s also a reflection of their own relationship as adults. They don’t get to see each other that much. They were communicating mostly on the phone, so that Jill could move forward with her life and follow her dreams. And it was a major sacrifice to her, because it meant not being able to be in the same city as her sister, which is something that so many people have to face in their lives. It reflects a little bit of the reality of the relationship too. But we were so lucky to get Ciara in this part, and she’s just such a wonderful actress and human.”

Wes’ love for Jill is expressed in many ways throughout the movie, but one of the most unique is when he gives away an item of great value: the ultra rare Black Lotus card from Magic: The Gathering, a trading card game made by Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast.

The entire Magic: The Gathering plot point — which is set up early in the film and comes into play later when Jill loses all the voicemails from Isabelle that she’s collected on her phone, and comes back when Wes trades the card to a colleague in order to get his hacker help in retrieving the messages — was another “really, really last-minute addition” to the script.

“To the point where I think we had actually already started shooting, or were like right about to start shooting,” McKendrick said. “And it was a really great idea that was really hard to accomplish.”

It came about when the studio suggested that Wes be the one responsible for retrieving Jill’s voicemails from Isabelle, when the original script had her going to an Apple Store and having a breakdown at the Genius Bar. And since Wes himself didn’t tech skills to get them back, he had to pay someone who could.

“He has to give something valuable, and they were like, what if it’s his car? What if it’s his parking space? And I was like, I don’t like him if his favorite thing is his car. That’s not endearing, and it just contributes to this douchebag image,” McKendrick said. “And I believe that deep down my character is not that. I believe that my character is probably like an undercover nerd, like all of us. And that makes me feel closer to him. And they were like, OK, but it has to be really valuable — what’s valuable in the nerd world? I was like, everything’s valuable in the nerd world! Originally I was like, Pokémon. And then I started doing some research, and it was really crazy, because they have to clear this stuff. And I’m already shooting, so they’re like, can it be a made-up game? And then I started learning about Magic: The Gathering, and realizing how expensive and rare some of these cards are, and how they could be like the holy grail, and you could search, and on eBay they might not be real. And I went down this rabbit hole of Magic: The Gathering, and I was like, ‘Do you think we could clear Magic?’ And I think we cleared it like the day of, or the day before we shot it. And they had to make the copy. It was like a whole frickin’ thing.”

But Robinson wasn’t sold on the idea when they went to shoot it.

“I remember Nick saying to me, ‘Are we sure about this Magic: The Gathering thing?’” McKendrick said. “And I said, ‘Nick, I have built the scenes in a way that if it does not work, we can cut it. Like, I promise you, I have figured this out. I’ve thought this through. We’ve got to shoot it.’ Then we start seeing him shoot the scene with the Magic: The Gathering card and I said, ‘You are not helping your case to get this stuff cut. You’re so adorable talking about Magic: The Gathering.’ Then I was like, ‘Well, we have all somehow fallen in love with the Magic stuff.’”

Not only is McKendrick the writer and director on the film, but she also acts as a supporting cast members in the role of Breeda, one of Wes’ best friends who is engaged to his other best friend, Andy (Harry Shum Jr.)

“I don’t know that I always planned on playing Breeda,” McKendrick said. “But it’s really important to me to be in all my movies. It does feel like shoving my actors into a freezing cold pool while being cozy. I want to be in the pool with them, and like we’re all doing this together. For my process, it just feels more real if I’m in the movie, in the world as well.”