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Zoe Kravitz

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Attending the 94th Oscars in Hollywood, California on March 27, 2022.

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A New Side of Zoë Kravitz​

For her provocative directorial debut, ‘Pussy Island’—starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum (whom she’s now dating)—the 33-year-old actor and musician was ready to write her own script.​


By Hunter Harris

Zoë Kravitz is in the panic stage of preparing for travel, running around Manhattan, squeezing in errands. “Packing’s funny,” Kravitz says. “I always talk about packing with friends of mine, about how it brings up all this anxiety—this is a whole concept I have—about who we want to be as people. You start to think, I’m going to this place, and who do I want to be in this place?” Outfits become fantasies; it’s less the mechanics of do I need this T-shirt or that one, and more, what will this new place conjure? But in reality, Kravitz says, “you end up wearing the same four things the whole time, anyway.”

Her destination is the set of Pussy Island, on the grounds of a lush Yucatán hacienda, a land of bacchanalia and vice that Kravitz herself has dreamt up. The movie, which will start shooting a few weeks after her arrival and is expected to be released in 2023, is the 33-year-old actor’s directorial debut. The script, which she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum, “was born out of a lot of anger and frustration around the lack of conversation about the treatment of women, specifically in industries that have a lot of money in them, like Hollywood, the tech world, all of that,” she says. She’d heard stories about powerful men inviting women to remote islands for hazy hedonist free-for-alls. What’s the version of that reality that I myself would want to see, Kravitz wondered. Then she started writing.

The title is intentionally provocative. It was the first thing that came to her when she started writing the script five years ago, before the #MeToo movement shook up Hollywood. “The title came from that world. The title is the seed of the story,” she says. While other projects have had their titles truncated—last spring’s The Lost City losing the of D, or Starz taking away P-Valley’s “ussy”—Kravitz says she won’t budge: “It represents this time where it would be acceptable for a group of men to call a place that, and the illusion that we’re out of that time now.”

In the movie, a Los Angeles cocktail waitress (Naomi Ackie) accepts an invitation to be whisked away to a tech mogul’s (Channing Tatum) private island. Danger looms in the debauchery. To sell the movie to MGM, Kravitz directed a sizzle reel with original and found footage to capture the tone she wanted: dark, funny, sexy, frightening. “I didn’t know Zoë before I met her for the film,” says Tatum, whose company, Free Association, is co-producing the project. “When we first met the movie was pretty different than its form now, but the themes were the same. All the iterations it has gone through were all pretty punk rock, to be honest.”

Kravitz took advice from Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in this year’s Kimi. She sent the script to her friends. “I thought that the script was dangerous, which I liked,” says one of them, fellow actor-writer-director-musician Donald Glover. “It feels really dangerous for a woman to make this story about power.”

Kravitz is stepping away from an acting career on a perpetual upswing to direct Pussy Island. “She’s a real thoroughbred and a bona fide movie star,” says Soderbergh. He uses Kimias an example: “She’s in 96 percent of the frames that exist in that movie. And to be able to pull that off with such poise and ease, that’s what movie stars do.” But directing isn’t a curious actor’s diversion. Does Soderbergh, who is also close to Pussy Island’s star Tatum, think Kravitz can pull it off?

“Of the people that I could name who I think have a real shot at coming out of the gate making something really distinctive and strong, she’s at the top of that list. Having said that, you really don’t know somebody until they show up on day one as the director,” he says. Kravitz describes the transition from being in front of the camera to behind it as using a different part of her brain. “I’m learning a lot about what it takes to make a movie and how many fires are constantly being put out before the actors show up to set,” she says. “I’m just kind of sitting back and learning and trying to not constantly be in a state of panic.”

For years, Kravitz has bounced between big projects, often playing the best friend, love interest or sidekick. She’s been a household name to people of a certain generation, but probably better known as Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet’s daughter to that generation’s parents. Kravitz was born into a creative lineage; listening to her describe her family is more like hearing about an artist collective. “They always remind me, ‘Why are we making art?’” she says of her parents. “‘You’re making [art] for yourself because you feel something that you want to express.’ I think it’s about bringing each other back to that place, because you get off course and start thinking about what people are going to think and all of that. I think it’s really about artists reminding each other that’s not why we’re doing it.”

In her early 20s, Kravitz made a series of indie films and seemed to reject a traditional Hollywood career. She also recorded music as singer of the Brooklyn band Lolawolf. The music was a spunky, flirtatious diversion: songs about hangovers, house parties, crushes. “I think it feels young and sweet,” she says of Lolawolf’s songs. “I always felt like I wasn’t getting to the place I wanted to with that music, mostly because of who I was [at the time].” She’s since started working on a solo album produced by Jack Antonoff, but it’s on the back burner. “I’m scared to make music, but I love it,” Kravitz says. “Now I’ve already kind of started it.”

By the 2010s, she was working in Hollywood, with small roles in the Divergent movies and an X-Men prequel; the Academy Award–winning Mad Max: Fury Road was a breakout film for her. Big Little Lies, the HBO series in which she played one of five secretive mothers, placed Kravitz in the center of its A-list milieu; later, she made an old movie her mother was in into a series of her own with High Fidelity, canceled after one season by Hulu. The Fantastic Beasts franchise, followed by The Batman, made her a bigger global star. “I know she feels the pressure,” Glover says of Kravitz’s efforts to be seen as more than “the daughter of.” He compares it to working with Malia *****, a writer on Hive, his upcoming Amazon series. “There’s always a pressure that’s like, ‘I actually have to do something that’s good, because otherwise people will say it’s not because of me being creative.’”

Kravitz, he thinks, makes work that anticipates getting dinged. “I think she just knows how the conversation is going to be. Her doing this script and directing it, I feel like she’s taking the risk to heart of like, ‘Yeah, you can’t say this is because of something else. Actually, this is my idea. This is my perception.’” Kravitz herself says as much: “There’s just a fear of judgment. The truth is, with almost everything I do, if I can get it to the point where I truly think it’s good, then I can kind of let things drop away where I’m not so concerned about what other people think.”

Today, over lunch at The Smile in SoHo, Kravitz is wearing jeans, a black T-shirt and a baseball cap. She has an impenetrable, angled stare, but her coolness isn’t icy. She’s prone to the occasional wry laugh. “I really didn’t feel beautiful growing up,” she says of her upbringing between California, Miami and eventually New York. “A big part of that was where I grew up, who I was around in terms of being the only Black girl,” she says. “I wasn’t exotic and cool-looking. I was the weirdo with the fuzzy hair.

“Then, you grow up and you look different now. It’s weird because it’s not really how I identify. I think a lot of people probably will hear that and think that’s ********, but that’s just how I feel,” she continues. “Even with directing, I think to myself, OK, I’m not going to be in a movie for a year. I hope we make another Batman. It’s just the sickness of the mind where I genuinely can convince myself that I won’t work again, that no one will call me and want me. That never goes away.”

Kravitz is quick to correct the record and speak her mind. When entertainment trades recently took a quote about her not being cast in The Dark Knight Rises out of context, Kravitz clarified it in an Instagram post. In March, two days after the Oscars ceremony in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, Kravitz posted a pair of red-carpet photos of her dresses from the evening: “Here’s a picture of my dress at the show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now,” read the first caption. When a commenter asked if she supported Smith defending Jada Pinkett Smith after Rock’s joke about her shaved head (Pinkett Smith has alopecia), Kravitz responded with a simple “nope.”

The internet’s wrath was immediate and fierce. Kravitz later deleted the images. “It’s a scary time to have an opinion or to say the wrong thing or to make controversial art or statements or thoughts or anything,” she says. “It’s mostly scary because art is about conversation. That should, in my opinion, always be the point. The internet is the opposite of conversation. The internet is people putting things out and not taking anything in.”

Kravitz doesn’t seem to be in a rush to win back the internet’s affection, nor does she seem particularly scorched by its reproach. “I was reminded that I’m an artist. Being an artist is not about everybody loving you or everyone thinking you’re hot. It’s about expressing something that will hopefully spark a conversation or inspire people or make them feel seen,” she says. “I think I’m in a place right now where I don’t want to express myself through a caption or a tweet. I want to express myself through art.”

She allows that it was a difficult situation. “I’m torn about what to say right now, because I’m supposed to just talk about it; I have very complicated feelings around it,” she says. “I wish I had handled that differently. And that’s OK.”

If she doesn’t like something, she’ll say it; if it’s her own work not meeting her standards of quality control, she might not ever put it out. “A lot of artists think they’re artists but they’re actually entertainers. She’s actually somebody who is like, ‘No, I know when someone’s lying to me. I know when I actually look good. I know when my stuff is actually good,’” Glover says. “I think she’s honed that. And that’s hard to do when you’re insulated in this legacy bubble, or people just think you’re a pretty face.”

“If I looked like that, I wouldn’t do any work at all,” says Soderbergh. “She’s so arresting to look at…. There are people you meet who are striking, who you can tell they’re never not thinking about that. And that’s just not who she is.”

It feels fitting, then, that the lead of Pussy Island was a role Kravitz wrote for someone else. She landed on the British actor Naomi Ackie, whom she met while Ackie was in the U.S. working on the upcoming Whitney Houston biopic. “I wanted to make space for someone else. This is a role that I would have loved to have played…[but] I genuinely think Naomi is worlds better for this part than I am,” she says. They bonded one night over tequila. “Zoë has this really lovely, warm energy,” Ackie says. “I immediately felt at ease.”

Something similar happened with Tatum, whom Kravitz is now dating. (She and the actor Karl Glusman had a brief marriage that ended in August 2021.) When asked about her current relationship, she demurs. “Do I want to go into that? I guess what I’ll say is when you make things with people it’s a very sacred space, and when you’re compatible with somebody creatively it often opens up other channels, because you’re kind of sharing all of yourself,” Kravitz says. “I’m really grateful that this movie has brought him into my life that way.”

Kravitz needed an actor who wouldn’t be afraid of the script she’d written, a man with a good-boy image she could complicate. “I wanted to find someone who hadn’t played a dark character before, because I think that’s exciting to watch someone who’s mostly played boy next door, good guy, love interest, all of that,” she says. (Tatum was eager for the anti-typecast: “The easy answer is it’s always really intriguing to have someone bring you something that literally no one else has ever thought of you for. And really even allowed you to ask yourself why and can you play someone so different than what you have.”) Kravitz was confident he could pull it off: “I felt, even from afar, before I knew him, that he was a feminist and that he wasn’t afraid of exploring that darkness, because he knows he’s not that. That’s why I was drawn to him and wanted to meet with him. And I was right.”

In Mexico, she’s reunited with her cast, the people she handpicked to play with. Now Kravitz is free to get a little loose. Over the phone, with birds cawing in the background, her voice has an energized lilt. Being on location has a summer-camp vibe. “I’m wearing a necklace that my mom gave me and an earring that Channing gave me. I have a T-shirt from my dad. I’ve been wearing a lot of things that remind me of people who I love, because it’s comforting,” she says.

Four days into filming and a few days away from directing her first big group scene, she seems to be basking in the challenge. “If you zoom out too much and think about the whole thing at once, it causes a lot of anxiety,” she says, “but if you focus on the present moment, it’s really fun.”

wsj.com
 
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