The Kravitz connection: Musician and model Zoë Kravitz reveals her teenage embarrassment at having rock star Lenny for a dad
With Lenny and Lisa (Bonet) for parents, it’s no wonder that ZoË Kravitz is an all-rocking, all-acting dynamo. She tells Elaine Lipworth about her starry but strict upbringing – and how her leather-clad dad made her cringe at the school gates
'My dad is cool, but he’s a regular father. He has an old-fashioned quality to him'
When Zoë Kravitz was growing up in Topanga Canyon, a wooded Los Angeles neighbourhood in the Santa Monica Mountains, her classmates had no idea that she was the daughter of rock musician Lenny Kravitz and The Cosby Show star Lisa Bonet. ‘My mum didn’t want people to know who my father was, so I was registered at school under Zoë Moon. It was like an alias that she made for me. She was very protective.’
Given that Zoë was living under a false identity, it’s interesting that as a small child, enamoured with the 1996 film Harriet the Spy, she ‘wanted to be a spy’. This morning, however, there is nothing incognito about Zoë, 26. With her braided hair, vintage baggy boyfriend jeans and white T-shirt, she is instantly recognisable and strikingly beautiful.
Spying was a fleeting phase – Zoë’s heart was set on show business. ‘I do think it’s in the blood,’ says the actress over brunch at a North African restaurant in Williamsburg, New York, where she owns an apartment. ‘You can never know for sure, but I was singing and dancing at my grandparents’ house before I had any concept of what my parents did, and I didn’t know any different,’ says Zoë, who is starring with Shailene Woodley in the new sci-fi thriller Insurgent, the sequel to last year’s young-adult hit Divergent. ‘If your parents were doctors you would know your way around a hospital. It’s the same thing.’
‘You have to pinch yourself when you’re getting ready to shoot a scene with Kate Winslet'
Lisa and Lenny split up when Zoë was two. Both encouraged their daughter’s ambitions: ‘They knew that I had been bitten by the bug at an early age.’
When she was 16, Zoë was cast in No Reservations with Catherine Zeta Jones, followed by Neil Jordan’s The Brave One with Jodie Foster. By then she had reclaimed her family’s name. Both her parents are black and half Jewish. ‘Kravitz is a cool name, a good Jewish name. I love my heritage – there’s so much history there.’
Her paternal grandmother Roxie Roker starred in The Jeffersons and was from the Bahamas, where the family still have a house. ‘The Caribbean culture is important to me, it’s dear to my heart,’ says Zoë. ‘The people there are beautiful and the way they live is so joyful. We’ve just had a holiday in the Bahamas and all my friends came. My dad hung out with everybody. He always goes into dad mode, making sure there are enough sheets and pillows and that we’re not hungry.’
Raised in a musical household, Zoë was educated in ‘the classics: Billie Holiday, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan… Otis Redding and Sam Cooke are my favourites,’ she says. As for her father’s music? ‘I’ve always loved it – I remember him singing around the house.’ Zoë herself has a successful rock band, Lolawolf (named after her half-brother and half-sister on her mother’s side, seven-year-old Lola and six-year-old Nakoa-Wolf). They recently released an album, Calm Down, and toured with Lily Allen. ‘My music means everything; it’s the way I express myself,’ she says. ‘I love being on stage – it’s like meditation.’
In her new film Insurgent, Shailene Woodley returns as Tris, along with English actor Theo James as Four. The cast also includes Suki Waterhouse and Kate Winslet. Looking at Zoë’s CV, her films are full of British and Irish co-stars (in X-Men: First Class she starred opposite James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, with whom she had a relationship). She has numerous friends in London and seems to be a bit of an Anglophile. ‘It’s probably the accent,’ she laughs. ‘Anything that’s different from what you have in your everyday life is attractive. Englishmen are such gentlemen, and Irishmen are fun. The whole UK situation is great,’ she laughs.
Insurgent is the second in the franchise based on the bestsellers by Veronica Roth, set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic Chicago, where citizens are placed in groups or castes, according to their gifts and qualities – Amity are peace-loving, Candor tell the truth, and so on. It emerged in the first film that the multitalented Tris was ‘divergent’, and therefore considered a threat to the status quo. Keeping her divergent nature a secret, she joined Dauntless, the tough warrior faction that polices the city, where she befriended Zoë’s character Christina. ‘We realise Dauntless is corrupt,’ explains Zoë, ‘so we turn against our faction, which is a fate worse than death. In Insurgent, we’re all on the run, we’re fugitives.’
Kate Winslet’s Jeanine is the malevolent leader of the power-hungry Erudite faction. She is planning to destroy all divergents and is on a mission to track down Tris. Working with the Oscar-winning British actress has been amazing, says Zoë. ‘You have to pinch yourself when you’re getting ready to shoot a scene with her. Because Kate is so well respected, you’d think she’d be serious, but she’s very funny. There’s none of that starry status thing.’
Zoë starring in Insurgent
Like The Hunger Games, with Jennifer Lawrence (which also stars Zoë’s dad Lenny), Insurgent is full of strong women. ‘Christina is tough and brave, she’s also witty and snarky; she says exactly what comes to her mind. Christina risks everything for what she believes in and I can relate to that because I am honest.’ The huge popularity of the franchise, says the actress, lies in the core theme. ‘Everyone has felt as though they belonged in a certain clique in school, or that they didn’t belong and were left out. The film speaks to young empowered people today, who are rising to the occasion when something is important to them, marching for what they believe in. I think young women are responding strongly to seeing themselves as the heroes.’
There was plenty of female bonding on the set with Suki, Shailene and Maggie Q, who also stars. ‘We would sit in each other’s trailers, talk girl talk, drink wine and cook together at night. We are all health nuts, so there were lots of salads and quinoa and fish, lots of kale, coconut desserts and flourless chocolate cakes.’
Zoë and Shailene (who had the leading role in last year’s tearjerker The Fault In Our Stars) have become friends. ‘Shai’s so kind, she always has a smile on her face and performs her a*** off. I love the way she lives,’ says Zoë, referring to Shailene’s famously hippyish lifestyle – a committed eco warrior, she drinks nettle tea, forages and makes her own natural deodorant. ‘I grew up around similar ideas in Topanga Canyon with my mother and her friends, who were all hippies, so it’s familiar.’
Zoë walking the red carpet with her father Lenny
Zoë at an event with her mother Lisa in New York
Life with her actress mother was ‘really normal. I went to school, I did homework.’ There was no TV. ‘My mum was strict; I was allowed to watch one movie a weekend, films from her childhood such as Bugsy Malone and Escape To Witch Mountain. I watched a lot of 1970s films growing up.’
Inevitably (despite the alias), Zoë’s childhood friends included the offspring of other celebrities. ‘Riley Keough is a really good friend of mine. Her mother is Lisa Marie Presley; we were at each other’s third birthday parties and we’ve just worked together in Mad Max: Fury Road,’ she says, referring to the upcoming apocalyptic blockbuster with Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy. ‘It’s nice to have someone who totally understands what you are going through, things that no one else could get.’
Aged 11, Zoë moved in with her father. ‘I was trying to spend quality time with both of them and I would spend summers with my mother. My dad’s cool,’ she says, ‘but he is a regular father and was strict in a lot of ways, such as about which friends I had and where I went. He has an old-fashioned quality to him. I had chores and an allowance and bedtimes. I got to travel and go on tour with him sometimes, which was great, and I was home-schooled for a bit.’
The Kravitz household was often full of music legends: ‘Stevie Wonder was at the house; he was very nice. Mick Jagger was too. They’re friends of my dad’s.’ It sounds exciting. Zoë looks nonplussed. ‘They’re just people; we’d eat dinner and hang out.’
One celebrity guest at the family home in Miami did create an impression. ‘I came downstairs one morning and Ashton Kutcher was in the kitchen making omelettes. He and Demi were staying at the house but no one had told me. Ashton was quite the teenage heart-throb at the time so it was shocking; I didn’t know my dad knew him. He was just, like, “Morning, do you want an omelette?” So we sat and ate breakfast.’
‘Super close’ to her father, she admits there were some embarrassing moments as a teenager. ‘When everyone else’s dad was wearing a suit, he had dreads and wore netted shirts and leather pants. You think everyone’s thinking, “That guy’s weird.” I would try to get into him to tone it down for school events.’
In obvious ways, Zoë’s life has been charmed, but she doesn’t come across as entitled. ‘My parents taught me from a very early age just how little it all [the business] means, so I don’t take it too seriously.’ And there have been formidable challenges. Between the ages of 13 and 17, she suffered from eating disorders. ‘I was bulimic and anorexic in high school. I felt as though food had this power over me.
'I was bulimic and anorexic in high school. Food became an enemy, which is sad'
Instead of looking at food the way you should, to be thankful that it nourishes your body, it becomes an enemy in some strange way, which is a really sad thing, and it’s a lot about anger. I was mad that I didn’t look like the girls in magazines and I was torturing myself. I didn’t feel attractive,’ she says. ‘I was always the odd one out.’
How did she recover? ‘I had some therapy, but to be honest that’s not what helped me. I relapsed and relapsed. Then it got to the point where I had to make the decision for myself that I would stop. You have to want to be done. Now I work out and try to respect my body. I’m not skinny, I’m a foodie,’ says Zoë.
Drawing on her personal experience, Zoë plays an anorexic young woman in the upcoming film The Road Within. It’s a poignant performance. She lost 20 pounds from her already slender frame by living on puréed vegetables for weeks on end. ‘It meant I had to revisit all that [childhood food issues]. There’s a lot of pressure on girls,’ she says. ‘If you’re shown nothing but women with perfect bodies, you wonder why you’re not like that. I think it is really important for all women to be able to say, “I’m beautiful.”’
Zoë with her Lolawolf band mates Jimmy Giannopoulos, left, and James Levy
Indeed, Zoë herself has modelled for designer Alexander Wang and is modelling for Coach’s 2015 autumn campaign. ‘It’s important for the entertainment industry to embrace different kinds of beauty and bodies. Not to knock the classic kind of beauty, but it does get boring after a while!’
Zoë also has strong views on diversity in Hollywood, pointing out that there still aren’t enough leading roles for black and mixed-race actresses. ‘It’s hard for brown women or women of any minority to get work and not just play “the friend”. Stories need to be written for and about brown women. People are very narrow-minded and it is hard for me to get the roles I want. I would like to do a film where colour doesn’t come into it.’
With back-to-back film and music commitments, Zoë feels there isn’t time for romance. ‘I’m at a point in my life where I’m so busy,’ says Zoë, whose ex-boyfriends include the actor Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl). ‘My friend Jimmy [Giannopoulos, her band mate] made a good point the other day. I was, like, “Wow, I’m not even thinking about dating,” and he said that was really healthy because when you’re waiting for love you’re focusing on something that doesn’t exist yet, as opposed to focusing on what exists right now. For me that’s my acting and my music. I’m way too busy to think about relationships. I’m dating myself right now!’
- The Divergent Series: Insurgent will be in cinemas from 20 March
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