Zoey Deutch Started Producing Her Own Movies ‘Out of Necessity’ (Exclusive)

For Zoey Deutch, adding producer to her resume was as simple as making sure she kept her acting career moving forward.

“Honestly, the reason that I started producing was just because I wasn’t getting the kind of parts and work sent to me to audition for that I was wanting to do. It was out of necessity,” Deutch, 30, tells PEOPLE as she discussed her new new romantic dramedy, The Threesome. The movie is the fifth film Deutch has received a producing credit on.

In the last eight years, Deutch has produced films, like The Year of Spectacular Men and Buffaloed, and is credited as an executive producer on Not Okay, Something from Tiffany’s in addition to The Threesome, which she stars in with Jonah Hauer-King and Ruby Cruz.

“I love to work and I want to work and I can either sit around and be bummed that it’s not coming my way or I can try to learn this new skill and I can try to create jobs and opportunities for people around me that are also feeling the same way and work with people that I love,” Deutch says of her decision to begin producing films herself some years ago. “So it wasn’t like I set out to do it for any other reason other than necessity.” 

In The Threesome, Deutch and Hauer-King, also 30, portray two friends named Olivia and Connor. The pair, on the cusp of embarking on a romantic relationship, have a night to remember with another woman named Jenny (Cruz, 25), only to have their romance rocked weeks later by the revelation that both Olivia and Jenny are pregnant.

While Deutch tells PEOPLE that many of the other movies she has produced were project she “developed and brought the movies together,” she joined The Threesome after the movie was ready to film. “So it wasn’t as boots on the ground as some of the others. But I always feel grateful for the opportunity to be involved in more conversations than actors generally are privy to,” Deutch says.

“I’ve made a lot of movies and I hope I can bring that experience and time and energy and information to the projects that I work on and I always learn and I’m always grateful to gain more information to bring onto to the next. It was more of a creative position on this one than anything else,” the actress continues.

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The Threesome is in theaters Sept. 5.