Inside Zoë Kravitz's (Shocking! Twisted! Brilliant!) Mind
Zoë Kravitz just wanted to make her mother laugh. She needed to get her attention first, though. They were at home in Topanga, California, and her mom was surrounded by her closest friends. The group was tending to her in a way that Kravitz, just nine years old at the time, could not. The funeral for Kravitz’s grandmother—her mother’s mother—had taken place only hours earlier, and everyone had gathered at the house after, wanting to help. Help host. Help clean. Be there.
Kravitz didn’t yet fully understand mortality. But she felt her mother’s sorrow and was desperate to alleviate it. So Kravitz snuck off to her bedroom. She put on her little pinstripe-suit costume and added a fake mustache, too. Then she grabbed a CD, popped it in the player, and turned up the volume on Brandy and Monica’s R&B heater, “The Boy Is Mine.” In front of everyone but laser focused on the reaction of just one, Kravitz broke out into a lip-synced routine.
The crowd laughed, including her mom. But what Kravitz said afterward left her mother short of breath. “Mama, don’t be sad,” she cooed. “For all we know, death is fun.”
Kravitz is telling me the story as an aside, twenty-five years later. It’s our second time meeting, and she’s just revealed the greatest source of anxiety in her life. It’s not the big, universal questions—How long until global warming burns us all to a crisp?—that fill her with dread. It’s the inevitabilities: the future loss of her own parents, for instance. Half a bottle of orange wine sits between us. The BLT she ordered—a large part of the reason we walked across Lower Manhattan from Washington Square Park down here to Dimes in Chinatown on a sweltering June afternoon, I gather—is nearly gone.
But her anecdote reveals something fundamental about Kravitz. She approaches life with a side-eyed, surreal sense of humor that is very much at odds with her public persona. This sensibility has governed how she has responded to everything that’s come since. To years of self-hate and insecurity; to an industry—a world—that rewards neither loyalty nor sanity; to professional rejection and personal heartache; to the ill will of web commenters and a doubting public. Her ability to laugh despite, well, everything is “something that gets me through life.”
And that offbeat sense of humor is partly what makes Blink Twice—her directorial debut (out August 23) and the biggest creative swing of her career—so damn watchable. Nearly a decade in the making, Kravitz’s bombshell social critique both terrifies and enrages. In between, veering from satire to slapstick, it makes you laugh. Like, really laugh. Though it’s not targeting racism per se, it’s poised to rile and rattle audiences the same way Jordan Peele’s Get Out did in 2017. It doesn’t just suggest a recontextualization of who Kravitz is as a creator; it downright demands it.
She chuckles at the memory of herself playing therapist in a pinstripe suit. At a little girl who had no clue what she was doing or saying. Or, perhaps, at the fact that she did.
You have an idea in your head of who Zoë Kravitz is. Edgy. Boho. Hippie. Cool. She probably says “Perú” with an accent. Maybe it’s the tiny tattoos that curl around her hands and arms that signal something, or maybe it’s her striking resemblance to her mom, Lisa Bonet, who exudes the mystical energy of a shaman or healer. Maybe her dad is the defining factor. After all, Lenny Kravitz has been synonymous with the concept of “cool” since he broke big in the nineties. Some want to believe that Bonnie, her breakout role on Big Little Lies, is the truest window into the real Zoë. Kravitz has denied it on several occasions. She has said that her HBO character would drive her insane in real life, and she’s even getting some of her ink removed. The ice-cool image sticks all the same.
“Some of it is probably my fault,” Kravitz muses. It’s the evening prior and we’re sitting at Kiki’s on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, sharing a plate of roast chicken with potatoes and the maroulosalata. The streets are buzzing. A heat wave will hit the city in a matter of hours, but right now, breezy and just past 9:30, it’s the exact sort of weather that seasoned New Yorkers know not to waste by staying in. Kravitz, wearing an oversize tangerine sweater with her hair pulled back into a low bun, is reveling in the scene. She explains what she means: “I protect myself.” Saying something isn’t true, after all, isn’t the same as correcting the record, and Kravitz has, for the most part, kept the world at arm’s length throughout her career. She reserves her sense of humor for those close to her. Tucks her peculiar worldview away.
Still, seeing how strangers talk and write about her can conjure a slightly out-of-body reaction. “It’s like they’re talking about another person,” she says. That sentiment is shared among her inner circle. Kravitz recently received a picture of herself in full glam from a friend. She looked beautiful. Refined, and a little mysterious. That’s exactly what the friend found funny. “You are actually like a Jewish comedian from the eighties,” read the accompanying text.
It’s not like she has some carefully crafted mystique or public-relations strategy. When her speech at her dad’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony went viral earlier this year—after she got big laughs for poking fun at his proclivity for see-through shirts—her representative remarked that there was “great pickup” of the moment. “I don’t even know what that means,” Kravitz says.
Growing up, she struggled with just how available Lenny was to the masses. Fans would approach, asking for photos and autographs or simply to talk, and young Zoë’s temper would rage. She didn’t get to see her father all that often. And she didn’t understand the psychology of fans or the relationship between a musician and his crowd. Couldn’t these people let her have a minute with her dad?
It wasn’t only that she had to share him, though. When Kravitz was young, her father had a hard time saying no. His group was too wide and too open, and she watched him get taken advantage of. It made her guarded. Possibly even a little suspicious. “I can smell it out pretty quickly,” Kravitz says of her ability to identify the motivations of those who enter her orbit. “I had to when I was a kid, because he didn’t. He’s really trusting, and it’s sweet, but I can tell exactly what someone wants.”
The idea of having her own fame felt good at one point, Kravitz admits. She wanted to taste what it was like to be known as more than just someone’s daughter or partner or friend. But it wasn’t long before, as she says, “I got a lot of anxiety around ‘Do I feel confident enough to go outside?’ ” She role-plays the scene: “I want to go get a coffee; it’s nice out, but I don’t like the way I look today. I don’t like my outfit. I have a pimple....” She’d lock the doors instead. Certain controversies also soured the mood. After stoking Internet hellfire when she posted comments critical of Will Smith for slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 Oscars, Kravitz retreated even further, handing over her password and power of upload to her team. But lately she has started learning to enjoy her stature. And she now roams in public freely, too.
With Blink Twice coming into view, however, Kravitz is confronting a different type of vulnerability. “I feel like my brain is being exposed to the world,” she says. It’s liberating and terrifying at the same time. The reaction from a friend who has seen the subversive thriller may not be helping: “Your mind is fucked up!” he remarked right after.
Originally, Kravitz wasn’t going to sit down for a profile interview pegged to the release of Blink Twice. “I felt like I should just be quiet and let people experience the movie,” she says. “I was hesitant to make it about me.”
A cooler head eventually prevailed. So did the reality of the business: “I want to promote the movie,” she says. Kravitz is instantly amused by how utterly basic that notion sounds as it falls out of her mouth. She adds a vocal effect that suggests oh doy! as she continues: “Like, that’s important to do.”
This article appeared in the Sept 2024 issue of Esquire
Kravitz was born at her parents’ home in Los Angeles on December 1, 1988. She was the first baby in their group of friends—her mother had turned twenty-one a few weeks earlier; her father was twenty-four—and for a time, the couple took her with them everywhere. “They would put a sheepskin rug on the floor and just have a baby around,” she recalls. The two split when Kravitz was still a toddler, and she spent the rest of the first decade of her life up in the Santa Monica mountains with her mother.
Home was warm and inviting. Music was always playing, and Bonet was always around, having taken a step back from her career as a sitcom star to raise Kravitz. Still, it wasn’t exactly normal. Bonet maintained a strict, mainly home-cooked vegan diet for herself and Kravitz, and though they had a TV, it wasn’t hooked up. No Internet, either. Bonet wanted her daughter to engage in more creative pursuits.
“Once she was born,” Bonet remembers, “she really became my art project.” Her daughter was silly, with a big imagination, she says, and they shared a preternatural bond. She realized this while still pregnant with Kravitz—about seven months along, she tapped one side of her belly and received a tap in return from inside. “Then I tapped on the other side,” she recalls, “and I could feel her move and tap back.” Later, she adds, “she was the soul that kept me here.”
On weekends, Bonet would take Kravitz to one of two local video stores and let her pick out a film. She encouraged her daughter to explore the titles of her own 1970s youth, and Kravitz cycled through as many as she could. She treasured her selections, watching them as many times as possible, back to back to back to back, before having to return the VHS tapes on Sunday.
Recovering from the peak of her Cosby Show fame, Bonet changed her name to Lilakoi Moon when Kravitz was five. (She still uses Lisa Bonet as a stage name.) And desperate to let her daughter make her own first impressions, she enrolled Kravitz in school as Zoë Moon. “It’s very sweet,” Kravitz says of the decision now.
She saw her dad a few times a year. Shortly after her parents broke up, Lenny’s career exploded, and the decade that followed was the busiest, craziest stretch of his professional life. “It was this whirlwind of a completely different universe,” she says of his visits. He was living loudly and without much restraint. It was intoxicating. “And then I would go home to this really quiet, really simple life,” she says. That got harder—as did living under Bonet’s stricter roof. When Kravitz was eleven, she relocated to Miami to be with her father.
Life in Florida was both wonderful and overwhelming, euphoric and, even decades later, a little unsettling. Unlimited TV. Pop-Tarts. Shopping. She could do it all, so she did. “It wasn’t that my dad didn’t care,” she says. “He just cared about different things.” Kravitz grew up—fast. And the sheen wore off quickly. “Just like it happens in the movies,” Kravitz recalls, “it’s like, ‘Oh, you think this is perfect? You think this is great? Guess what comes with this.’”
What were you like as a child? I ask. “Quite awkward,” she says. The way most kids are awkward? “A little bit more than that,” she says, laughing.
She had trouble fitting in, partly because she was, indeed, a little goofy. But there were other reasons. Both of Kravitz’s parents are half Black and half Jewish. Until they crossed paths, neither had ever met another person with their background. Enrolled in exclusive, largely white private schools, Kravitz stuck out. “People were confused,” she says. “How are you Jewish if you’re Black? If both of your parents are Black, how are you half white?”
To blend in, she would try to minimize her own Blackness. “It’s a lot of like, ‘No, no, no, I’m also white! I’m cool like you guys!’ ” she says. But the other kids’ taunts and insensitive comments still hurt. “ ‘Your hair doesn’t look wet when you come out of the pool—that’s weird.’ ”
She wished for siblings. And it bothered her that her schoolmates only paid her any attention when her dad appeared at pickup. “I was always a little lonely,” she says. She was also shocked by the way kids her age were partying.
Kravitz asked Lenny to relocate to New York. Miami wasn’t working, but she felt deep in her core that Manhattan would. She was right. Enrolled in the Rudolf Steiner School, she felt, for the first time, that she and her classmates shared common ground. “It was weirdos like me,” she says. Kravitz was an okay student and a terrible athlete, but she was comfortable in the drama club. “I wasn’t some genius actress,” she says. She just fit in. “I felt safe.”
Her social life sped up in New York—a town where you don’t need a rock star for a father to find fun. This worked out, actually, because right after Kravitz and her dad arrived, he left for a tour. “And his house was under construction,” she adds, laughing at the memory of the chaos. Lenny flew a cousin in from the Bahamas to play guardian while he was gone, and they bounced between hotels and rentals. She found her friends, as well as her places. La Esquina downstairs. GoldBar. The Beatrice Inn. “I don’t even know where I was going, but I was going out,” she recalls.
Kravitz has said before that she feels guilty about her decision to leave her mother. That remains true. In some ways, it’s more poignant than ever. “I think it was very hurtful that I moved away from her to be with my dad and my dad wasn’t even there,” she says now. And it’s not that she wishes she’d stayed. “I just wish I had been able to appreciate what she was doing for me,” Kravitz says. “She was so focused on preserving my innocence. My creativity. Because she knew what the world is—that you don’t get that back.”
Kravitz has a lot of love for her old nightlife haunts. But lately she’s been reflecting on the life she led in her younger days. “I definitely found myself in situations I didn't need to be in,” Kravitz says, sounding just about rattled. “You want to grow up so fast, and then you get out there and you realize, oh shit.”
She logged her first onscreen credits (No Reservations, The Brave One) before graduating from high school, and after freshman year of college she decided to drop out to pursue acting as a profession. Her parents were a little surprised. “I really thought she was going to go into music,” admits Bonet. (Kravitz is a gifted singer and songwriter and years later would indeed go into music, fronting the R&B/electronic duo Lolawolf.)
More small roles came. It’s Kind of a Funny Story. Twelve. Californication. Then she started to land small roles in really big productions—X-Men: First Class, the Divergent series, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Mad Max: Fury Road. Offers for lead roles trickled in, but more often, they were for sidekicks and best friends.
At certain times, Kravitz has done well with very little on the page. At others, her steely, muted style has read as borderline blasé. There were periods when it was hard not to wonder what vehicle would finally reveal the sum of Kravitz’s creative parts. “I always knew it would come,” says Nicole Kidman. The two actresses were paired together on Big Little Lies, which debuted in 2017. That’s when Kidman, who dated Lenny when Kravitz was a teenager, saw her taking a huge step forward. In a cast that featured Reese Witherspoon and Laura Dern in season 1, plus Meryl Streep in season 2, a less capable performer could have dissolved into the background. But Kravitz turned heads. “She’s got this quiet confidence,” says Kidman. “She draws you in.”
There was still distance left to go, though. “I wanted to do more,” Kravitz says simply. Then came 2020’s High Fidelity, a gender-swapped second adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel, the first being the 2000 John Cusack classic that, yes, also starred her mother. In addition to starring on the Hulu series, Kravitz served as an executive producer and a writer. She did everything from sitting in on casting to approving music-licensing requests. “I had to really step up,” she says. And she did. What’s more, she liked it. It was the first time in her life that she felt truly confident.
Or, as her mom says, recapping the realization: “Oh, she’s a good little Miss Bossypants.”
In 2017, Kravitz felt a story coming on. She was in London filming the second installment of the Fantastic Beasts series. The shoot was long, but her part was relatively small. (It only got smaller when, as she recalls, halfway through production it was decided that her character, Leta Lestrange, would be killed off.) It was a big opportunity for her, and she was just happy to be there. “I was just going with the flow.” One day, after her scenes had wrapped—or maybe before they’d started—she opened a new Word doc on her laptop and wrote two words: Pussy Island. What the hell was that?
On days off, Kravitz found herself at a little café down the street from her East London rental apartment, typing away. “I wrote this insane fever dream of a novella,” she says. A tech billionaire named Slater King. A hedonist island. It all flowed out. But she wasn’t sure what she had exactly. Kravitz sent the doc to her friend, E. T. Feigenbaum, and asked him to cowrite with her.
It would take them more than four years to arrive at a final draft. Through the pandemic, they spent their days on FaceTime and Zoom, writing and rewriting, for eight hours at a time. Kravitz was quarantined in London, filming The Batman. Feigenbaum was at home in New York. And as the world opened back up, the two kept working on it.
She shared drafts with friends and former collaborators. Her family and many others. At one point, she sent a treatment to the shriekfest aficionados at A24. Her concept was out-there—but wasn’t that sort of their thing? “They were like, no, this is crazy,” Kravitz remembers with a laugh. The production house wasn’t wrong in its decision, she’s quick to add. “It wasn’t ready.”
She and Feigenbaum continued writing. Tinkering on changes both big (how to pull off that twist ending) and small (should Slater King be a rock star or a tech mogul?). She found a producer in Bruce Cohen (Big Fish, American Beauty), who happens to be her godfather, then took his notes and tinkered even more. “There were so many iterations,” says Naomi Ackie, who stars in the film as Frida. Although details of the story were rapidly changing, what attracted Ackie to the project stayed the same: “I’d never seen anything like the tone,” she explains. “She balances this serious subject with this dry humor, not allowing us to sit in anything too long.” You may as well be describing Kravitz, I remark. Ackie laughs. “You’re right.”
Kravitz only ever had one idea for the male lead: Channing Tatum. Dark and twisted, the movie would be unlike anything the actor had done in his career. He was right for it, though. She was certain.
But Tatum—surely you’ve noticed—is a massive star. He’s busy! Kravitz had never even met him. She sent the script to his production company anyway and scored a meeting—but not the news she wanted. He told her it wasn’t ready. She went back to the keyboard, checking in with him here and there along the way. “Note calls,” she says. Her persistence eventually earned the script another look. Though Tatum still had notes, this time he was sold.
With a heavyweight producer and a talent like Tatum attached, Kravitz knew her movie would get made. Yet there were people in her circle who wondered if that was a good thing. In 2022, just months before filming would begin, Kravitz starred in the most high-profile role of her career: Selina Kyle—Catwoman—opposite Robert Pattinson in The Batman. Shouldn’t she capitalize on that and book her next big acting job?
It wasn’t just the scale of The Batman that made it a hard decision. The experience had also completely transformed her approach to acting. In years past, Kravitz would enter auditions assuming that everyone on the other side of the room was waiting for her to mess up and give them a reason to say no. Through her work producing High Fidelity, Kravitz realized that directors and producers are, with every hopeful who enters, equally desperate for them to be a fit.
So for the first time ever, she went into her audition with Pattinson and director Matt Reeves as if she already had the gig. “She had so many good ideas,” says Reeves. “She was thinking really deeply about the character.” It unnerved Pattinson, in fact. “I still thought I was going to be fired at that point,” he recalls, laughing. “I didn’t quite understand that it wasn’t my audition; it was her audition. And she was so at ease with the character. She came in improvising! It was crazy.”
She could have channeled all that into her next role. “There were definitely people who thought it was a mistake,” Kravitz says of pursuing her own film so aggressively. The possible downside was obvious: The further The Batman faded from the front of audiences’ minds, the fewer the potential offers. Also, there was a chance her movie wouldn’t attract or resonate with audiences. Or as she phrases it: “What if it’s a piece of shit?”
In the end, Kravitz decided to stick with Pussy Island. What happened to that name, anyway? Pussy Island was more than a working title. It was the title through draft after draft. Kravitz touted it in interviews. She said how much she loved the reaction it provoked.
Kravitz knew this question was coming, but still, she pauses. “I mean, look, we got pretty far,” she says of the decision to change the title to Blink Twice. When it came time to put a marketing plan in place, the studio balked. Kravitz fought hard at first but then thought better of it. And, no bullshit, she likes the new name.
Regardless, this sticks with her: “Am I upset that there is a show called Dicks: The Musical? Kind of.”
So does this: “What’s interesting is that they tested the title and the people who were most offended were women.”
Zoë Kravitz doesn’t sleep that much. Or that well. “I’m a bit of an insomniac,” she admits. She generally struggles to doze off before four in the morning, so when scheduling allows, sleeping until noon suits her best. During stretches when her calendar is jam-packed, as it is right now, she runs on just a few hours of rest.
She fills her free time the same way you do. Grabbing coffee down the block, a breakfast burrito from around the corner. Pattinson, her friend of more than a decade, can’t believe how casual she is about enjoying New York. “She’s got no fear of going into whatever location,” he muses. At each restaurant we duck into, the staff knows her—not because she’s famous but because she’s been there before.
She loves New York in the summer, in all its dirty glory. During our time together, the city pushes back on her attempts to romanticize it. Diners at a table across the street shriek as something darts between their feet. (Yes, a rat.) Multiple waiters are required to force the creaky sliding glass windows closed behind us. Two tables down, a water jug crashes from its perch and shatters on the sidewalk. Kravitz won’t budge. “It’s happening out here right now,” she quips. “Rats. Windows. Things are breaking. That’s New York Fucking City, baby.”
Where you and Kravitz may differ in how you fill your time, though, is in this way: Zoë Kravitz watches a lot of movies. Like, a lot. Presented with even a few hours of downtime, she’s at the theater. The night before we met, she’d been to the Metrograph to see The Departed. And before scheduling forced us to cancel, she had wanted us to go to a showing of Pulp Fiction. In our two days together, I see Kravitz’s cell phone only once, when, as our dinner ends, she proposes we try to catch a show the next day and pulls up the options.
“She really doesn’t do anything but watch movies,” Tatum says—though Kravitz gave him fair warning. “She’s like, ‘I don’t do activities. I don’t go hiking. I just love movies.’ ” The humor in his voice suggests he grossly underestimated how serious she was.
And it’s not just that she appreciates how a shot looks or how a scene is composed. “They help me get out of my head,” she explains.
She loves watching Tarantino. Loves Paul Thomas Anderson, Penny Marshall, and David Fincher. Scorsese and the Coen brothers. Roman Polanski has made a couple of her all-time favorites: Rosemary’s Baby and The Tenant. “Controversial,” she admits of admiring Polanski—at least to other people, she qualifies. Kravitz has no difficulty separating the art from the artist. “It’s okay that somebody bad was involved in something good,” she says by way of explanation. “What are we supposed to do, get rid of America?”
This week and all of the next are booked with work. But after that, she’ll be home in Brooklyn for a month straight, having dinners and generally catching up on life. She missed a lot of it while she was locked away editing her film. “My relationships have been put on hold in a major way. I really was not able to be there for almost anybody.”
Pattinson seconds that, though the laugh that follows indicates how little he was bothered. “I kept hearing from people, like, ‘I think Zoë’s gone mad. Someone needs to take the movie away and put her in an asylum.’ ” Talk to Kravitz about her process and you get the sense that she’d agree.
Kravitz is social, but she has a relatively small group of friends. In recent years, she has felt a shift in terms of how they orient around one another. People are getting married. Having kids, too. It makes hanging out hard, and Kravitz misses the stretches of time in her twenties when her inner circle operated more like a family. “My house used to be full of people all the time, everywhere,” she says a little wistfully.
Kravitz isn’t sure she wants children. It took her years to feel comfortable admitting it. “For a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with me,” she says. “I was waiting for this light to go off in my head, and it never did. When you’re younger, you’re like, ‘Well, I can’t have kids. I’m too young! It’d be crazy.’ ” But then one day, you aren’t too young anymore. And it wouldn’t be crazy. “I had to actually look at What do I want?”
These epiphanies began to sprout during her marriage. She wed her longtime boyfriend, actor Karl Glusman, in 2019 at her father’s townhouse in Paris. The party was great and so was he, but the reckoning came anyway. “I realized I had been ignoring it and not even thinking about the future,” she says. The couple broke up at the end of the following year and divorced in 2021.
It might be good, she thinks, to find friends who are of a similar mind regarding procreation: “people who are around to go have dinner out of nowhere or whatever.” But it’s not just easier scheduling she craves. It’s something more. “For a lot of people that have children, it is this giant, life-changing event—and I do think there is a certain amount of focus and respect that they should get from their community,” she says. She simply wants the same in return. Acknowledgment that even if the things going on in her world don’t revolve around children, they might feel just as big to her. “There’s a lot of pressure on women to have children, and there’s a feeling that if you don’t, you don’t have purpose here. But this movie, it feels like I gave birth.”
What will you do now? I ask her. I mean it literally. It’s eleven o’clock and our dinner is ending. Kravitz has had a long day. Still, she’s got hours before she turns in. “Chan’s in town,” she volunteers. “Which is so nice.”
Sometime after Tatum accepted his role in Blink Twice but before filming began, they became a pair. It just kind of worked. They fell in love and then managed to keep their relationship private for several months—until one unbelievably humid summer day hit. Kravitz was walking with Tatum to her writing partner’s apartment and quickly realized that she was overdressed. Shit. She didn’t feel like breaking a sweat. Tatum told her to hop on the back of his BMX bike. And while no one had noticed the two on foot, this sight was impossible to miss. The Internet lit up and did its thing. (Read: made them a meme.) “I think it’s funny,” Kravitz says of the viral moment.
The couple are bicoastal. (Tatum, who shares an eleven-year-old daughter with his ex-wife, resides in Los Angeles.) Last fall, they got engaged. No matter what you might’ve heard from her dad, a wedding date has not been set. In a recent interview, the rocker said they were looking forward to the celebration “next year,” and when I mention it, Kravitz rolls her eyes in mock annoyance. “It’s literally something we’ve said in passing,” she explains. “Like, maybe I said, ‘Next year would be cool.’ ”
Tatum arrived last night, but Kravitz hasn’t really gotten to see him. She’s eager to get home so they can watch the newest episode of MasterChef. The couple discovered it only recently but have already conquered all thirteen prior seasons; they’re now suffering the weeklong wait between new episodes. (“We also like Love Is Blind, which I shouldn’t even be saying,” she adds.) Tatum isn’t as much of a night owl, but the time change helps.
So does this: “He’s adaptable.”
And this: “I sleep differently when he’s home.”
You may be wondering what Blink Twice is about. I can tell you that. But I can only tell you a little bit about what happens.
At its core, the film is a thrilling, thoroughly fucked-up meditation on power. It’s a scathing commentary about the inequality between men and women and the corroded structures that govern society. It raises big questions like “Which is better: to forget or to forgive?”
And like all high-concept movies that are as good as this one, it can equally be about none of those things. It can be about a group of people who gather on an island to party with a tech mogul after a weird-as-hell benefit dinner—and the very many things that go horrifically wrong.
When I ask Kravitz if she thinks things are getting worse for women, she seems surprised by the question. “I don’t think they’re getting better,” she says, “but I don’t think they’re getting worse.” On second thought, though, she reflects on the recent changes in laws around reproductive rights and fertility care. Those are a huge step back. “It’s the only reason to care about what’s going on politically, for me,” she says.
Kravitz used to consider herself highly attuned to the news of the day. She was obsessed with the last presidential election. But it had an adverse effect, she found: Kravitz became numb to all the headlines. “I would look at my phone and see something horrible happened, scroll, and then see a kitten and feel the same about them both,” she says. She put up guardrails. These days, she won’t consume any news first thing in the morning, and definitely not late at night. She’s reduced her Instagram log-ins to just a few times a week. “I’m so much happier,” she says.
For many women, the realization that the world isn’t fair is a gradual dawning. You encounter your first double standard and then another. For others, it arrives in a single, violent episode. Kravitz admits that her blinders may have come off a little later than most, for understandable reasons—she is American entertainment royalty, after all. “I was born with access to rooms that people spend their whole lives trying to access,” she says by way of explanation. “And I’m not afraid that I’m gonna get kicked out. I’m not afraid I can’t come back. I’m not afraid of getting in trouble. So for a long time, I would watch this game, almost as a spectator, and judge both sides.”
But at some point Kravitz did need something from someone. Approval. Attention. A million little things that, in time, amounted to one big realization. “Oh, I’m the thing I was watching before.” A woman looking for equal footing, not sure how to get it. Not able to get it. It all fueled the creation of Blink Twice.
Which is not to say that she was in any way prepared for the experience of making a movie. When Kravitz arrived on location in Mexico, she was obsessively organized. She’d storyboarded the whole film and documented all the references in a handy binder. Then came the first day of filming, after the years of anticipation. She took in the reality of the cast before her: Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Naomi Ackie, Simon Rex. The crew who barely spoke English. The fact that, despite the location sales rep telling her that it definitely wasn’t going to be the rainy season when they’d be filming, it definitely was the rainy season. The reality of it all slapped her clear across the face.
At the end of her first day, Kravitz crawled into bed and then into a ball. One thought ran through her mind: I can’t do this. Tomorrow came anyway. And days 2 and 3 presented new challenges—one of her actors was injured on set and had to return home immediately, meaning Kravitz needed to recast the role just as fast. With fewer than thirty days to film, the team also needed to figure out how they’d reshoot everything they’d done so far. The pace forced her to get out of her own way. She quips, “No time for an existential crisis.” And soon she found her groove. “She just kept making the next best decision,” recalls Tatum.
When filming broke each evening—or morning, in the case of the production’s many night shoots—Kravitz was wired. Respite came in curious form: Is It Cake? on Netflix. She and Tatum watched it obsessively while on location.
It’s become a thing for them. For one of Tatum’s birthdays, she found a baker who was up to the task of helping her carry out her vision for a multiday prank. One afternoon on vacation with Kravitz, he went to take a bite of fried chicken, except... it was cake. Tatum thought it was funny. He also, crucially, thought the prank was over. He was wrong.
The remote control in their room? Cake. His travel toothpaste? Cake. “I just hear in the bathroom, ‘What the fuck?’ ” she says, laughing. She saved the best one for last: a sock he’d packed in his suitcase. She put it on the floor, nestled among his other laundry. Kravitz couldn’t believe it when he reached for it. He’s gonna do it, she thought. He did. It fell apart in his fingers. “I felt like I had accomplished greatness,” she says, delighted all over again at the memory.
If Kravitz was shocked by what it took to direct a movie, she was bowled over by the editing process. When she returned to New York, she begged the studio for a week off to recover. And then, as soon as she got back to work, she promptly freaked out: “I remember stepping out with my editor and saying, ‘Oh God, I totally fucked up.’ ”
Directors generally have ten weeks to deliver their first cut. But when the Hollywood strikes broke out, she ended up with much more. It turned out to be a blessing. Kravitz stepped away from the project. The distance helped her come to terms with the reality that what she had planned was not what she shot—and what she shot could never be what she had planned. She restructured the entire movie in her head. “I was like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.”
Once the strikes ended, she and her editor worked, without a break, for months on end. Even when she wasn’t working, she was working. “I’d be having conversations, but instead of listening, I’d be thinking about a scene,” she says. At the end of each day, she’d go home and lie on her bathroom floor for hours. Not scrolling. Just thinking. She was barely sleeping, and the evening nightcaps—a whiskey neat—and the cigarettes weren’t helping.
Kravitz is happy with the results. Extremely happy. So are the people in her life who’ve seen it. “It’s one thing getting a movie made,” begins Pattinson. Getting something made that’s also this good? He’s shocked in the way that only someone who understands this industry intimately can be. “It has artistic integrity, all the performances are great, it’s crazy and accessible?” Stylish, too. Fun. Dark. He’s got only a few words left: “Like, Jesus Christ, Zoë.”
What do you do when the thing you wanted to do most is done? When the project that saw you through a marriage and a divorce, a pandemic and a global shutdown, and a budding flame turned true romance is over? Kravitz is trying to figure that out. “It’s sad and weird,” she says of this time. “It’s been an obsession.”
She misses life in front of the camera. Sort of. Working on Blink Twice definitely made her realize that maybe, while she really likes acting, what she truly loves most are movies. As she says, “Acting was just this way that I could fit into this thing that I loved.”
She’ll pick roles from directors she wants to learn from, she says. Like Darren Aronofsky—Kravitz will star in his upcoming film Caught Stealing opposite Austin Butler. And in time, she may return to the role of Selina Kyle. (“I think Matt’s writing right now,” she says.) Big Little Lies season 3 has an even murkier timeline, though it’s been vocally supported by cast members. Kravitz echoes the sentiment over dinner. “I’m waiting for someone to tell me where to show up.”
For several years, she has teased a debut solo album. What’s going on with that? “Nothing!” she says with gusto. She rarely finds herself writing music lately, and she can’t believe she ever actually got onstage and sang in front of a crowd. “I’m too anxious now,” she says. “Too neurotic” as well. Plus: “Do people really want that?” she asks. “Like, I don’t even know where to go dancing anymore. Who wants to hear an album from someone that doesn’t even know where the fuck to go dancing?”
In 2022, much was made of Kravitz’s name appearing in the credits for her pal Taylor Swift’s Midnights LP. But she didn’t really write with Swift, she clarifies here. There was a song that Kravitz had written for herself that she worked on with Jack Antonoff, and, as she explains, “elements of that song got used.” She didn’t expect or request a credit. In fact, she tried shrugging one off, but Swift wouldn’t hear of it. “She’s very kind in that way,” says Kravitz.
While she may not know where to go dancing, Kravitz does still know how to throw a party.
It started with her birthday. Tatum and his friends usually plan a celebration for her, but “I’m a control freak, so I do it.” Pattinson confirms both that the party was a lot of fun and that her managerial style is decidedly perfectionistic. Watching her oversee a guest list, he says, is “like nothing I’ve ever seen. When I throw a party, I don’t know like 75 percent of the people who are there.”
A Valentine’s Day party followed. And lately people have been telling her she should open her own spot. Not just a bar. Not really a nightclub. She’s thinking about it. For now she’s reveling in the fact that even one person she’d never met before this week has watched her movie. “I’m still getting used to the fact that you’ve seen it,” she says.
“It’s like you know me.”
Opening photo credits: Vintage Prada dress, available at Chérir Vintage; vintage Prada underwear, available at Artifact Vintage; tank by R13; sandals by Larroudé; earrings and snake ring by Jessica McCormack; necklace, stylist's own; cover image credits: Dress by Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello; shoes by Bode; snake ring, band rings, and earringsby Jessica McCormack; necklace, stylist’s own.
Photographed by Zoey Grossman
Styled by Andrew Mukamal
Production by Boom Productions
Hair by Nikki Nelms at The Only Agency
Makeup by Nina Park for YSL Beauty
Nails by Aki Hirayama using Essie
Set Design by Griffin Stoddard
Design Director Rockwell Harwood
Contributing Visual Director James Morris
Executive Producer, Video Dorenna Newton
Executive Director, Entertainment Randi Peck
Tailoring by Jacqui Bennett
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