Zooey Deschanel Gives ‘New Girl’ Fans a Treat With Her Debut on TikTok

Zooey Deschanel joined TikTok Friday and shared the perfect first video. She recreated the opening for New Girl, the hit Fox sitcom she starred in from 2011 to 2018, just adding a hilarious little twist at the end. Her fans embraced the clip, which has already been viewed over 6.5 million times.

In the clip, Deschanel, 41, takes fans on a tour of her home while singing along to her original recording of “Hey Girl.” In the end, she stopped the song short though. At the end of the song, Deschanel sang, “It’s Jess,” referring to her New Girl character, Jessica Day. “No, it’s me, Zooey. I’m on TikTok,” Deschanel said over the last line of the song.

The clip earned over 1.4 million likes and over 26,000 comments from TikTok users. “This made my year thank you for this,” one person wrote. “So TikTok knows that New Girl is the only show I watch,” another wrote. “I’ve never followed someone so fast,” another commented. Some fans also noted how Deschanel looks like she has not aged since New Girl ended. “You literally haven’t aged a day,” one fan wrote.

Others commented on how stylish Deschanel’s home looks, theorizing that this is because she is dating Property Brothers star Jonathan Scott, whom she met while making an episode of Carpool Karaoke: The Series in August 2019 with her sister Emily Deschanel and his brother Drew Scott. Deschanel started dating Scott after she split from her second husband, Jacob Pachenik. Their divorce was finalized in June 2020.

New Girl launched on Fox in 2011. The series also starred Jake Johnson as Nick Miller, Max Greenfield as Schmidt, and Lamorne Morris as Winston Bishop. Hannah Simone also played Jess’ best friend, Cece, and Damon Wayans Jr. co-starred as Coach. Megan Fox also starred on the show in Season 5 while Deschanel was on maternity leave. New Girl is available to stream on both Netflix and Hulu.

Creator Liz Meriweather and the cast recently had a virtual reunion for Variety. The show’s finale notably had a flashforward scene where the characters’ children joined them for a game of True American, the show’s famous drinking game. “It was really hard for me to let them go… I felt like it was very hard to not know what happened in their lives,” Meriwether said. “We just wanted to show that everyone was happy and okay because you really do fall in love with these characters.”

As for a reunion, Meriwether suggested fans need to be a little more patient. After all, the show only ended three years ago. “I think we need a little more water under the bridge is what I’ll say, but yeah,” Meriwether told Variety. “When it feels right, when the universe says it’s time, I will be there with my little tippy-tap computer writing stuff.”