She's running to stand still

I’d been nervous about interviewing Zoë Kravitz all week. Not because she is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful and self-possessed women in the world, but because for our initial icebreaker activity she’d chosen to go bowling, a sport for which I have absolutely zero aptitude.

We meet at The Gutter in Williamsburg, a trendy bowling alley-cum-bar. Think craft beer and distressed leather. Zoë arrives looking effortless. It’s a mild March afternoon here in New York; a light beige trench over a crisp white shirt shrouds her petite frame, a string of red beads hangs around her neck and a ludicrously capacious Saint Laurent bag is slung over her shoulder. Her hair is down, her ’90s-inspired sunglasses are on, where they remain for the rest of our encounter. She looks good: composed, confident, as though she’s about to absolutely annihilate me in a game of skittles.

But I’ve forgotten to bring my ID. As someone who looks about 105, I didn’t think I’d need it. “No ID, no entry,” says the rather po-faced hipster behind the till. If I thought embarrassing myself at bowling would be bad, getting rejected from it entirely hits even harder. But Zoë couldn’t be more relaxed. Instead, she takes me on a walk through McCarren Park, where we end up sitting outside at cult café Five Leaves. She orders a hibiscus iced tea (she skipped dry January and so is observing dry-ish March) and I have a wet white wine.

Apart from maybe one double-take, nobody on the sidewalk seems to bat an eyelid at Zoë Kravitz. Which is surprising. Only the day before, news outlets were flooded with images of her walking down the street, arm in arm with maybe-boyfriend, maybe-fiancé Harry Styles. Was that official Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally album merch she was wearing? Is that big, fat bling on her left hand an engagement ring? Internet sleuths assemble.

It’s even more surprising given her illustrious IMDB profile. Zoë is an Emmy award-nominated actor, who also has credits as a writer and director. This is someone who threw Alexander Skarsgård down the stairs in Big Little Lies. We’re talking about Catwoman! And then there are her parents – the eternally leather-clad rocker Lenny Kravitz and actor Lisa Bonet – who helped define ’90s pop culture. In a way, she has always been part of public consciousness. And yet, today she is anonymous.

“It’s an energy thing,” she says, explaining why no one is presently accosting us. We’re now at downtown eatery Dimes, two days after The Big Bowling Reprieve. She’s wearing a navy crewneck sweater by The Row, vintage black tailored trousers and a waterproof Arc’teryx hoodie. It’s pretty packed here and the acoustics are terrible – not ideal for an interview – but it’s homey and she’s comfortable. This is what it’s like to be a part of Zoë’s world: chatting with the Dimes waitstaff on a Friday afternoon and washing down salmon and black rice with turmeric ginger ale. “For the most part, in my neighbourhood, I’ve lived here forever, so I’m around.”

Maybe it’s because she is photographed wearing sunglasses all the time and looks really good in a bucket hat, or because she lives in Brooklyn and used to be in a band. Maybe it’s just “an energy thing”. Whatever it is, there is a specific mythology surrounding her – a quality that colours a lot of her first encounters. “She came to a fitting with me once in a zip-up nylon track jacket under a vintage shearling coat, with brown slacks and loafers, with a set of keys hanging around her neck on a long lanyard, and to this day I still think about how cool she looked in that outfit,” recalls stylist Danielle Goldberg. “But the truth is, it had nothing to do with the outfit, it was her. Zoë just makes everything cool because she is.”

“The word ‘cool’ gets thrown around a lot,” says Zoë. “It’s something that is written about me or it’s what people, when they get to know me, tell me that they thought I was going to be like. People might tell me, “Oh, wow, I was intimidated when I first met you” and “I thought you were going to be like this.” And to me, it’s really surprising because it feels far away from who I am.”

This tension – between perception and reality, public and private – is something she recently explored in the series The Studio, Seth Rogen’s movie industry satire, in which Zoë plays a more “controlling psychopathic” version of herself, obsessed with winning awards. “The episode idea called for a filmmaker who had directed a film that was nominated for a Golden Globe – and was someone my character, Matt, would desperately want recognition from,” Rogen writes over email. “She ticked every creative box we had and then some.”

She could have left it there, and we’d all come to the same conclusion that Zoë Kravitz is someone who is both hilariously funny and can make fun of herself. It would have chipped away at this idea of her being so composed and aloof. But after someone else pulled out at the last minute, she was brought back for two more episodes, in which she accidentally spikes herself on magic mushrooms. Shroomed-out Zoë is soft, sweet and silly. The result is unexpectedly endearing and sheds light on who she is as a person, outside of this perceived public persona.

“The idea of seeing Zoë completely lose her mind on drugs just became hysterically funny for us to picture,” says Rogen. “We knew she could pull off big comedic swings from the first episode we shot – and so to really let her cut loose was pure joy.” Which is exactly how it comes across: joyful. “A lot of my friends who saw the last two episodes were like, ‘That’s you,’’’ says Zoë. “I think the whole thing with fame is people projecting things onto you. The less you tell people about yourself, the more people will project what they think. So it was really fun to know that people think a certain thing and play against that to make it funnier.”

This playful, gentle side is something to which actor and costar Nicholas Hoult has been privy. “As a friend, Zoë is funny and always has been caring through our friendship,” he says. “My favourite memory is watching season one of Breaking Bad during the shoot of Mad Max; she would crochet and I would knit. Hopefully, that’s a glimpse of our life in the nursing home in 59 years’ time.”

This autumn sees the pair reunite on screen in David Leitch’s crime drama How to Rob a Bank. “This was my third time working with Zoë and I loved seeing how much she’s grown and evolved creatively,” says Hoult. “She’s always looking for what can improve each moment, not just for herself but for everyone involved.”

In the film Zoë plays Reagan, a renegade hacker who joins forces with an ageing detective (played by John C Reilly) to expose a group of masked robbers who turn elaborate bank heists into YouTube tutorials. “I liked the story because it’s really ambiguous, depending on who you are, what you believe in,” says Zoë. “I like that this character is on neither side and kind of gets sucked into the situation. She gets to see both sides, which is interesting.”

Born in 1988 in Los Angeles to Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz, Zoë spent her formative years between shelter and exposure. There was the wholesome, hippy-ish quiet of Topanga Canyon – no TV or internet, just her mum’s VHS tapes from the 1970s and a vivid imagination – and the glare of her father’s spotlight in Florida. “His life was very shiny,” she says. “I think I thought it was fun and now I look back on it, I’m so appreciative of what my mom attempted to preserve. She was very protective of my privacy.”

Although life with Lenny was loose, his fame came with complications. There’s a lot of derogatory discourse surrounding the “children of”. “The nepos,” Zoë corrects me. Yes, they are born into immense privilege, but they also have to share their famous parent(s) with the entire world. It’s jarring. “I mean, as a kid, you don’t really understand that. My dad would come and go, and I really valued my time with him. And so, I think for me, it was more about really wanting time and then all these people would come and try to take him away.”

It didn’t help that she felt like an outsider at school. As a mixed-race, Jewish kid, she didn’t look like any of the blonde cheerleaders. Having to then deal with the entire school swarming the parking lot to catch a glimpse of her rock star father just exacerbated things. “In that environment I did not fit in and felt quite awkward and quiet.” It wasn’t until they moved to New York that she found her people, weird arty types who were into theatre. It’s also where she re-engaged with acting. “It was the one place where I felt really comfortable. I was like, ‘I understand this.’” Growing up an only child, Zoë was encouraged to play by herself, always dressing up and recreating the characters from her favourite films. “I lived in my head a lot. My mom said to me the other day, she was like, ‘Living inside of your head must be really intense.’” For Zoë, acting became a release.

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Things escalated in 2022, when Zoë starred as Selina Kyle/Catwoman in Matt Reeves’s The Batman opposite Robert Pattinson. After that, she could have done anything – leveraged her superhero status and landed a lead role in more blockbuster fare – but instead of chasing commercial fame, she turned inward, returning to a personal project she had been developing with E. T. Feigenbaum since 2017. The result was Blink Twice, an urgent feminist reckoning about power inequality starring Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum. “I just started writing this thing, and I couldn’t stop. That is one of my favourite things about art; it’s that when it gets its teeth into you, as an artist, you become obsessed. It was all I could think about. Anyone who was still my friend after I made that film, I really appreciate, because I was gone.” For Zoë, Blink Twice was pivotal, not just in terms of her career, but in consolidating her identity as an artist. “It’s crazy that other people have seen it,” she says. “It’s like someone opening the door and being inside my brain – it’s very exposing.”

That exposure extends to her personal life. Before filming began, Zoë was pictured beaming on the back of Channing Tatum’s bike and the internet promptly lost its mind. Of course, Zoë had been in previous relationships. From 2019 to 2021, she was married to actor Karl Glusman, but this was the first time her love life really became a source of public interest. I ask her what it’s like to fall in love in the public eye. “I think doing anything in the public eye is uncomfortable,” she says.

The conversation meanders towards Harry Styles, with whom Zoë has been frequently photographed since last August, after a fan posted photos of them holding hands in Rome. Where did they meet? What do they do when they’re not walking across the Williamsburg Bridge? Is she the light that Harry sings about in “Aperture”? You’ll have to ask him, because her team was very clear about this line of questioning. And it isn’t surprising; Zoë is someone who cherishes her privacy. She doesn’t even have Instagram on her phone (in its place, there is now a language-learning app).

Of course, she’s aware of all the noise – and it can be deafening. “I’m aware it’s happening. I’m aware of when it’s happening, like when there are eight people outside my house, that’s super uncomfortable. I’m aware of all the ingredients that create the thing that we’re talking about. But that doesn’t mean you’re necessarily OK with it.” She finds it too unhealthy to engage with. “There are moments obviously when you just want to hide because it feels overwhelming and then there are moments when you, whether it’s in a defiant way, are like, ‘I’m going to walk and get my coffee and you’re not going to take that away from me.’ People sometimes ask me, ‘Why are you walking around?’ It’s because I live in New York. I live three blocks away. I’m not going to get in a car.” I would 100 per cent get in the car, I tell her, but I have a deep aversion to walking. “But when the weather is nice? I want to participate in life. Even though the experience is different, I still would rather have that than be someone who completely closes myself off and doesn’t want to walk to get a coffee, because then who are you? Maintaining any kind of normal state, I think, is really important.”

She was clearly in one of her more defiant moods when she and Harry were spotted walking down a London street in April, coffee in one hand and a gigantic, easily six to eight-carat engagement ring glittering on the other. An image now so ubiquitous it’s practically a meme, much to the chagrin of diehard Harries (as his fans are lovingly known). Although most of them remain firmly in denial. “That’s not the same ring lmao,” wrote one decrier on fan account DeuxMoi. “It’s just publicity,” chimed another, referring to the fact that Zoë is an ambassador for jeweller Jessica McCormack.

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Lately, she’s been preoccupied with the passing of time. “I think that I’m hyper-aware of the fact that I’m going to die one day. The other day, I was walking past this woman, she was very old and she was walking so slow. The fact that I can just walk up a flight of stairs with no problem is amazing. Someday I might not be able to.” That said, she feels ambivalent about ageing, because suddenly everything shifts: the roles and spaces that are available to you; the way you’re perceived. “As women, so much of our value is about the way that we look. There is this complex relationship between being annoyed at the construction guys who are whistling at you. And I’ve talked to a lot of women about when that stops and what that feels like. There’s a version where it feels liberating and a version where you feel invisible. I really want to get to that place where I am happy with who I am without that.” And that means learning to accept herself in the here and now. “I really want to work on elevating or evolving my inner self,” she says. “If I spend all this time now mad that I don’t look the way I want to look, it’s like you’re wasting it. Whether you get Botox or not, you’re going to age. You’re going to look different in some way. If you don’t do the work internally to prepare yourself for the fact that life is going to happen to you, then that’s going to be the hardest part.”

We finish our lunch and ask for the bill. Zoë has to get to a meeting and the din at Dimes has got so loud that we keep catching snippets of other people’s conversations. “You’re going to print what he just said as if I’d said it,” she says, laughing, referring to a rather obnoxiously loud voice behind us. I ask her if there are any misconceptions about her that she’d care to correct, but she declines. “I’m not going to add to the noise. Trying to correct something that people, who don’t know me, might think about me, feels like I’m putting ice cream on top of a steak.”

In short: you only get to know Zoë if she wants you to. We say goodbye, she puts on her sunglasses and I watch her disappear into the street. Effortless, anonymous, cool. It’s definitely an energy thing.