Specifically she was thinking about her weed guy.
Heâd come around with product concealed in a guitar case. âHe would only talk in code,â Kravitz remembered. âLike, âDo you want a guitar lesson today?â But then sometimes he would screw it up, and be like, âDo you want guitar?â Iâm like, This isnât code anymore.â
She was in her early 20s then, working only on and off, just another smart, young Brooklynite with time on her hands and a propensity for overthinking. She couldnât have known it, but she was also doing research for her first headlining role, in the Hulu series âHigh Fidelity,â based on the 1995 lad-lit novel by Nick Hornby. Kravitz plays a Brooklyn record store owner whose life â and love life â is going nowhere particular, a part for which all those guitar lessons were inadvertent research.
âI did a lot of dumb stuff,â she said, but used a more pungent noun than âstuff.â
âFun stuff,â she said, âbut dumb stuff. And was probably a really difficult person to be in a relationship with. But I think maybe any 21, 22, 23-year-old is.â
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Back in Los Angeles, the lunch crowd had mostly cleared out while Kravitz talked about living in New York, young and unfettered.
She wrapped her hands around a mug of green tea. She has the names of her younger siblings, LOLA and WOLF, inked across her middle fingers. Certain creepily comprehensive Internet sites suggest that she has at least 55 tattoos in total, many as small as punctuation. She wore a white cardigan. Her hair was cut short and pressed to her scalp in dark waves. Her characters often tend to say less than they know, forever side-eyeing the world around them, but in person sheâs sharp, emphatic, easily moved to passionate outbursts by a piece of omakase (âLike butter. Like butter!â) or the two-decade-old âSeinfeldâ where George builds a bed under his desk. (âItâs just so funny. Oh, man.â)
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It feels like Kravitz, 31, has always been famous â an indelible screen presence and iconic parents will do that â but for years sheâs been on the fringes of the action, playing haunted supporting characters in epics like âMad Max: Fury Roadâ and the âDivergentâ series. But thatâs about to change. In a day or two she was leaving for London to start shooting her biggest movie role to date, playing Selina Kyle â better known as Catwoman â in director Matt Reevesâ âThe Batman.â Robert Pattinson plays the Caped Crusader, Colin Farrell is the Penguin, and in true star-of-a-comic-book-adaptation fashion, Kravitz said she couldnât say much else, except that she never imagined finding herself central to a movie like this one.
âI really thought I was going to do theater and indie films,â she said. âThat was what I liked growing up. And also, that was what I thought I was suited for. I didnât see a lot of people who looked like me in big movies.â
Just a few years ago, Kravitz â whose parents, actress Lisa Bonet and rocker/scarf influencer Lenny Kravitz, are both African American and Jewish â had been discouraged from auditioning for a part in one of Christopher Nolanâs Batman films. Not by Nolan personally, she said. It wasnât a Catwoman-size part.
âIt wasnât like we were talking to the top of the top in terms of who was casting the thing,â she said, âBut they said they werenât âgoing urban.â I thought that was really funny.â
A lot has changed since â for Kravitz personally, and in the business as a whole. From Tessa Thompsonâs Valkyrie in Marvelâs cinematic universe to Halle Baileyâs Ariel in the forthcoming live-action âLittle Mermaidâ reboot, itâs become less unusual for actors of color to book roles not originally conceived with an actor of color in mind, particularly in comic-book and fantasy material, where parallel universes collide and anything is possible. (Itâs worth noting that women of color have played Catwoman twice before, including Halle Berry in a somewhat infamous 2004 film.)
Sometimes, though, inclusive casting highlights just how much work Hollywood â newly woke but still groggy â has left to do, when it comes to actually telling diverse stories. For two seasons, on HBOâs âBig Little Lies,â Kravitz has played Bonnie Carlson, the yoga-instructor wife of Reese Witherspoonâs characterâs hunky ex. Amid a stacked cast of A-listers going for broke â trashing one another verbally, sometimes trashing rooms literally â sheâs been an island of wary reserve, her eyes suggesting painful depths.
But in the first season Bonnie seemed to float at the periphery of a story that prioritized the tribulations of its well-to-do white characters instead. In the second season, Bonnie got a real story line â which required her to sit by her comatose mother in a hospital room few of the other characters ever visited. Critics and viewers noticed; the show was roundly criticized for its apparent lack of interest in Bonnieâs inner life.
Kravitz said sheâd been drawn to the role of Bonnie â whoâs white in the Liane Moriarty novel that inspired the series â because it was a chance to work with director Jean-Marc ValleĂ© and with âthis dream castâ of Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Shailene Woodley, who sheâd made three âDivergentâ movies with and who sheâd practically grown up alongside. When she first read the script, Kravitz said, âit felt really fresh and necessary, and like it was filling some kind of creative void I didnât know Iâd really had.â
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It didnât bother her, she said, that the show never acknowledged that Bonnie was the only prominent person of color in the seriesâ otherwise monochromatic Northern California milieu.
âIn the first season, there was something really refreshing about not making that a story line,â she said. âItâs frustrating when people of color can only play a character thatâs written as a minority,â she added. âSo itâs refreshing when itâs not about that. But itâs complicated, because you donât want to ignore that fact. Part of our responsibility as storytellers is to tell the truth.â
She said sheâd brought up ideas for Bonnie, ways to explore her position in the world of the show that felt truthful. âI pitched things, and it didnât resonate with everybody and thatâs OK,â she said, âItâs not like I didnât have anything to do. Bonnie has a lot going on besides the fact that sheâs a minority, you know? But that detail and that depth would have been delightful.â
Kravitz was born in 1988, when her mother was best known as Hillman College undergrad Denise Huxtable on the âCosby Showâ spinoff âA Different Worldâ and her father was a struggling musician who still went by Romeo Blue. They split in 1993, when Kravitz was 4; the following year, Bonet and her daughter settled in relative seclusion on 5 acres in Topanga Canyon.
Bonet rocketed to fame as Cliff and Clair Huxtableâs second daughter, and then lost that job â she had creative differences with Bill Cosby, beginning when he refused to write Bonetâs pregnancy with Zoe into the series. In an interview, Bonet said the move to the mountains was, at least in part, âa retreat from a world that I was probably unprepared for, at the age I was out there playing in it.â
She also wanted to give her daughter a connection with nature and nurture her imagination. She was a limited-screen-time parent before âscreen timeâ became a topic of widespread parental concern. They had a VCR and a collection of tapes â mostly stuff from Bonetâs childhood. âThe Little Rascals.â The original âFreaky Friday,â with Jodie Foster. âBugsy Malone,â a Prohibition-era gangster musical starring a cast of children. (âThat was a big one for me,â Kravitz said.)
Kravitz was always a performer, Bonet said. She remembered the night of her motherâs funeral, when Kravitz favored family members gathered at the Topanga house with a song â âThe Boy Is Mine,â by Brandy and Monica.
âZoe put a suit on â I think she had a mustache and glasses â and came out and brought so much joy to the whole room,â Bonet said. âNo one told her what to do â it was just pure, from her imagination, with the intention to lift the spirits in the room.â
Kravitz would have been around 9 when this happened. At 11, she relocated to Miami to live with her father, whoâd long since shed the Romeo Blue moniker and become one of the biggest rock stars of the age. There are different stories about how Zoe Kravitzâs move to Miami happened, depending on whom you ask.
âThere was a whole seduction,â Bonet said, âto a life outside of living in the mountains, with just a monitor and a VCR, compared to screens in every room and private chefs and a big house. There was no real conversation, not between her father and I. But it was necessary. She needed to find out who her father was, and that was the way.â
Lenny Kravitz recalled the situation somewhat differently.
âShe wanted to live with me,â he said, âand I wanted to have her. It was time. And as a family, we made the decision together.â
âIt really helped me to focus my life,â he said. âI was running around the world touring, man ... I had to make some lifestyle changes.â
Still, life with Lenny Kravitz came with no shortage of rock-star perks. He shared a label with the Spice Girls at the time; one year Zoe sat with them at the Grammy Awards. âI donât remember if it was Scary or Victoria,â Lenny said, âbut she was sitting on one of their laps, and she was in heaven.â
But according to Zoe Kravitz, there were more prosaic reasons that life with her father appealed. Lenny Kravitzâs house had Pop-Tarts. Lenny Kravitz had cable. âI just wanted to feel normal,â she said, âand the way my mother was raising me felt very abnormal, even though looking back, it was the coolest.â
Some time after moving to Miami, Zoe Kravitz told her father that she wanted to act. âMy mom wanted me to wait until I was an adult to start working,â she said, but her dad felt differently.
âIâm a person who left home at 15,â Lenny Kravitz said. âI would do nothing but support my child in what she wanted to do, absolutely. And it was her decision.â
What everyone seems to be able to agree on is that this would have happened no matter what â that sooner or later Zoe Kravitz would be doing what sheâs doing right now.
âI mean, look, sheâs a mad artist,â Shailene Woodley said in a phone interview. âZoeâs constantly looking at the world around her, thinking, âHow can I leave this place better than it was when I got here? How can I continue to use my talents and gifts as a singer, as a writer, as an actor in a way thatâs meaningful and impactful for future generations and have fun doing it?â â
Woodley was calling from London, while preparing for a dinner party. Even as the sound of arriving guests became audible over the phone, she kept on singing her friendâs praises.
âI think â not âI thinkâ â I know one of Zoeâs major superpowers is that sheâs funny as hell,â Woodley said, using a different four-letter word. âPeople donât realize how funny Zoe Kravitz is. They see her and they see this super-hip, cool girl. But her superpower is humor and comedy and understanding the complexities of life and somehow morphing them in a way that polarizes drama and humor. As a creator I think thatâs what gets her ticking.â
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Zoe Kravitz is an executive producer of âHigh Fidelityâ as well as its star, and the show â funny and poignant and surprisingly personal â feels like a product of her sensibility. Kravitz, who attended high school in New York and has fond memories of loitering after school in grubby record shops like Kimâs Video and Music, the bygone East Village institution, said sheâd long been a fan of the book and particularly of Stephen Frearsâ film version from 2000, which starred John Cusack as Rob and Lisa Bonet as a singer with whom he rebounds.
âFor some reason,â she said, ââHigh Fidelityâ was one of the few pieces of art that my parents had been a part of that I was really able to separate from them. Itâs a weird thing, because it can be really uncomfortable and strange watching your mom kiss John Cusack or whatever, but it became a film that I loved and watched and could quote.â
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Sarah Kucserka, who developed the Hulu series with Veronica West, said when they brainstormed leads, âthe top of the list â pie in the sky, itâs never going to happen â was Zoe.â Kucserka noted, âShe has a lot of depth, and that was what this character needed. You couldnât come at it with someone who only brought one thing to the party.â
Hornby was only dimly aware that a TV version of âHigh Fidelityâ was in the works. But last year, Kravitz asked if they could meet. âShe seemed to have a lot invested in it,â Hornby said, âand was restless in her urge to get it as close to what she wanted as she could.â She asked for, and received, his blessing.
âOne of the things Iâm most proud of about the book,â Hornby said, âis that â Iâve realized this more and more over the years â itâs not just about me. Itâs not just about people like me. Itâs about way more people than I thought.â
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In the initial script, the main character lived in Los Angeles and would have worked at a radio station. Kravitz proposed moving it to New York, and into a dusty basement record shop. Those choices, she said, helped determine other aspects of the show, like setting the story in Crown Heights, a part of Brooklyn where a dusty basement record shop and its owner could realistically survive. (Kravitz, who married actor Karl Glusman last June, has lived in Williamsburg for more than 10 years, long enough to watch gentrification transform it; her favorite bagel shop is now an Apple Store.)
The staff of the record store now consists of two women of color (Kravitzâs Rob and DaâVine Joy Randolph of âDolemite Is My Nameâ) and a shy, gay man (David Holmes). When Rob runs down her top five heartbreaks in flashback, the list includes women as well as men.
None of this, Kravitz said, was about clearing some imaginary bar for wokeness. They just wanted a cast that looked real.
âI was trying to recreate a world that I know,â Kravitz said, âand thatâs what it looks like. It doesnât look like a bunch of white girls, like the show âGirls,â â whose portrayal of New York-area hipsterdom struck many viewers â Kravitz included â as demographically specious.
âIf that show was in Iowa or something, fine, but youâre living in Brooklyn,â she said. âThereâs people of color everywhere. Itâs unavoidable. Same thing with Woody Allen â like, how do you not have black people in your movies? Itâs impossible. Theyâre everywhere. Weâre everywhere. Iâm sorry, but weâre everywhere.â
Kravitz acknowledged that there might be reflexive resistance to the idea of a gender-flipped âHigh Fidelity,â as there is to gender-flipped anything, among a certain class of consumers. âI think a lot of white men who identified with the book think itâs theirs,â Kravitz said, âand are ready for us to screw it up, and are going to have trouble seeing it in a different light. But I think if they get past that thing, theyâll see that we actually really did honor the property, I think.â
This kind of conversation is good practice â Kravitz is about to fly to London and shoot a movie in which she plays an iconic comic-book character, and sheâs aware that any attachment âHigh Fidelityâ fans may have to an idea of Rob Gordon pales in comparison to the proprietary feelings contemporary nerddom harbors regarding Batman.
âAs long as I donât allow it to get in the way of what I need to do to find this character and make her my own, so that it can be as authentic as possible, I welcome all the fans and their opinions and their love for this world,â she said, with a diplomatic smile.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .