Zoe Kravitz

Zoë Kravitz was born with a name to live up to. But as an actor, director and performer she has made it her own. She talks about fame, the perils of cancel ...

“I love to walk around and be a part of that city,” she says. Being a woman of colour and being an actor and being told at that time that I wasn’t able to read because of the colour of my skin, and the word urban being thrown around like that, that was what was really hard about that moment.” “I don’t have a lot of friends in London, so it was super isolating.” “It was crazy,” Kravitz says, of the day that filming stopped. “The psychology of humans is really interesting to me,” she says. And to hear stuff that my mother tells me about being a biracial girl in the 1970s, and being abused or being spit on, and what that felt like, you know?” I ask whether her parents ever gave her “the talk” about racism before she entered Hollywood. “They never warned me or anything,” Kravitz says. “It sucked,” she says of the cancellation. In 2012, Kravitz attempted to audition for the Batman film The Dark Knight Rises, but was told she was too “urban” for the role. “We used to joke,” she says, “that my version of rebellion would be, like, to become a lawyer or something. The turning point was “realising what it meant,” she goes on, “for my grandmother to get a job on The Jeffersons, and be a Black woman on TV, and what it meant for her to be in a biracial relationship on television. “If I needed the toilet, someone had to escort me in and out.” I wanted to make sure it felt believable that she was physically capable of doing all the things she was doing.