Who Is Cazzie David? The New Umbrella Academy Cast Member Has a Famous Dad

If you're wondering where "Cazzie" came from, the name was actually inspired by an NBA star. "I was named after a basketball player on the Knicks," she told Coveteur during a June 2017 interview. "My dad is that much of a Knicks fan that he had to give me the craziest name ever." Her namesake? Cazzie Russell, who won an NBA championship with the Knicks in 1970.

As Cazzie was born in 1994, she was too young to remember the heyday of Seinfeld, and — even though she was older when Curb Your Enthusiasm debuted in 2000 — she didn't really grasp the extent of her dad's fame. "I didn't even know my dad was famous, to be honest," she told W in October 2017. "I was in elementary school when [Curb Your Enthusiasm] started, and by the last season, I was in high school, but I still don't remember it really being on the air . . . It was never spoken about, never thought about."

After graduating from high school, Cazzie attended Emerson College in Boston, where she studied writing for film and TV. It was at Emerson that she met Elisa Kalani, with whom she later wrote and produced a web series. "She was my college roommate and we were in screenwriting classes together," Cazzie told Complex in April 2017 in reference to her collaborator. "We asked our teachers if we could partner up because we thought it would lessen the homework load. It backfired and they doubled it. Very annoying, but we realized we worked really well together."

While attending Emerson, Cazzie landed an impressive internship at Vanity Fair through editor-in-chief Graydon Carter, who was a family friend. Her first assignment: to review the 2013 film Lovelace, a biographical drama centered on porn actress Linda Lovelace. "After it was published, there was an article about the nepotism of me being able to publish this piece, and it totally wrecked me," she confessed to the Los Angeles Times during a November 2020 interview. "It made me feel so awful. But it didn't stop me, it seems." Luckily, Graydon loved the review and later hired Cazzie as one of the writers for Air Mail, his digital weekly newsletter.

Following her time at Emerson, Cazzie and her friend Elisa decided to write and produce a web series called Eighty-Sixed, which stars Cazzie as Remi, a social-media-obsessed millennial coping with a breakup. As she explained to Glamour in September 2017, her goal with Eighty-Sixed was to create something that felt original. "I felt like portraying a candid, hypersensitive young person interacting in this new digital world and failing at it felt new," she said. "I wanted to tap into a new sector of the millennial mind and show a genuine side to the realities they're facing."

Though Cazzie always imagined herself a writer, she never thought she would take to acting as well as she did. "I never really thought I would be acting because I had really low confidence," she told Coveteur during her June 2017 interview, explaining that she found comfort in writing instead. "I would write stories sometimes and they would end up being unintentionally funny," she added. "When you're miserable, it can be funny. That's something my dad told me."

Cazzie counts herself as a big fan of her dad's (if not his biggest fan). In fact, when asked to name her favorite TV show by W in October 2017, she admitted it was Curb Your Enthusiasm. "It's my favorite show. How embarrassing is that?" she joked. "I have to hide if I'm watching it when someone is coming over. It's so weird if I'm watching it." She's such a fan that she even worked on set as a production assistant on the series when it returned for its ninth season.

Thanks to her mom, Laurie David (who's an environmental activist and the brain behind the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth and Fed Up), Cazzie is also passionate about saving the planet. When asked what she hoped to see humanity achieve in the next 50 years by Oyster in December 2016, Cazzie said that she wants to see the climate crisis solved. "I hope there will be a complete redo of our energy system, no more coal and fossil fuels as well as massive agreements and progress with India and China," she said, adding, "I've been programmed by my environmentalist mother."

Like her dad, Cazzie can't stand New York City, and she hates it so much that she wrote an entire essay about it for The Hollywood Reporter. Even after spending a summer in NYC for her Vanity Fair internship, Cazzie still deems the city exhausting and dirty, and as a germaphobe, it's kind of her worst nightmare. Plus, she hates crowds. As she told The Cut during a July 2017 interview, "New York is tough for me."

Also like her dad, Cazzie is highly neurotic and constantly anxious, which is a problem that's plagued Cazzie her whole life. "I give people this anxiety test as a joke, because anxiety has become such a trend, and it deeply annoys me," she explained to the Los Angeles Times. "I ask them if they had anxiety when Clinton or Obama was president. Have you taken a nap in the last two years? Do you like roller coasters? Do you like scary movies? There's a difference between having stress and having an anxiety disorder, and that's never feeling safe or comfortable or like the rug is gonna be pulled out from under you at any second."

Though some credit her success to nepotism (especially following the release of her 2020 essay collection, No One Asked For This), Cazzie said she's more aware of her privilege than people probably realize. "Unfortunately I'm hyper self-aware, to a fault," Cazzie said of her Hollywood connections and advantages during a November 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly. ". . . It's just the kind of thing where every time I enter a room I'm like, 'I'm sorry. I'm here. I know I'm privileged.' I'm aware it's very unappealing, and I don't know what to do about it. It's a horrible quality."

However, though Cazzie is aware of the pull her famous parents have, she feels certain that she couldn't have succeeded without her own talent. "I know there's a world where I wouldn't have gotten this book published if I didn't grow up the way I did," she added, "but that didn't help me write the book. I hope maybe my writing is just as loud as my blatant privilege is."