Zoë Kravitz, the actress who stepped behind the camera to study powerful men

Zoë Kravitz

Photo: dvna creative agency: https://www.dvna.fr/ / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 1, 1988 Venice, Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actress and filmmaker
Known for	Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Batman
Awards	Black Reel (shared)

For most of her career, Zoë Kravitz was cast at the edge of someone else’s story, usually as the person in the room who seems to know something the lead does not. When she finally chose where the camera would point, she aimed it at a tech billionaire’s private island and at the cocktail waitress he invites there, and she wanted to call the film Pussy Island until cinemas balked at printing it on a ticket. Retitled Blink Twice, it answered one question about her and opened another: whether Hollywood now sees a filmmaker, a star or, still, a famous daughter.

That last label arrived before she did. Her father is Lenny Kravitz, her mother is Lisa Bonet, and the household that formed around them, later including a stepfather named Jason Momoa, kept her in front of photographers long before she had a credit of her own. A good part of what followed reads as a patient effort to be judged by the work instead.

Kravitz was born at her parents’ home in Venice, Los Angeles, on December 1, 1988. Her parents divorced when she was four, and she grew up with her mother in Topanga Canyon, joining local drama clubs and putting on shows at her grandmother’s house, before moving to Miami at eleven to live with her father. She finished school at the Rudolf Steiner School in Manhattan in 2007, spent a year in the acting conservatory at SUNY Purchase and then left for Brooklyn, where she still lives, to work in film.

The first parts came while she was still in high school: a babysitter hired by Catherine Zeta-Jones’s character in No Reservations, a brief turn in the Jodie Foster thriller The Brave One. Small independent films followed, It’s Kind of a Funny Story among them, and so did music. She fronted the band Elevator Fight and later Lolawolf, named after her younger half-siblings Lola and Nakoa-Wolf, which released the album Calm Down in 2014.

Studio films found her quickly and seldom knew what to do with her. In X-Men: First Class she played Angel Salvadore, a mutant with insect wings, shooting her flying scenes on wires in London. In the Divergent films she was Christina, the heroine’s friend. In George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road she was Toast, one of the wives who escape the warlord Immortan Joe, and in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them she was Leta Lestrange, a character whose backstory carried more weight than her screen time. The sharper work sat on the margins, in Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope and in her voice roles as Catwoman in The Lego Batman Movie and Mary Jane in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

Television changed the arithmetic. As Bonnie Carlson in HBO’s Big Little Lies, the yoga teacher married to the ex-husband of Reese Witherspoon‘s character, she held her ground opposite Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern and shared in the cast’s Screen Actors Guild nomination. Then Hulu gave her a lead. High Fidelity turned Nick Hornby’s record-shop novel around so that a woman, Rob, did the brooding over old breakups, with Kravitz producing and writing as well as starring; an episode she co-wrote with E.T. Feigenbaum won a Black Reel Award. The casting carried a family echo, since her mother had appeared in the film adaptation two decades earlier.

The series is also where the tidy version of her story cracks. Critics liked High Fidelity, and Hulu cancelled it after a single season in 2020. When Tessa Thompson posted her regrets on Instagram, Kravitz replied with a sarcastic line about all the other Hulu shows led by women of colour, followed by “Oh wait.” It was a rare moment of her talking about the business in public, and it named what the cool, unbothered image she had been selling to fashion houses since she was twenty tended to hide. Nobody doubted that she could hold a camera’s attention. Whether she would be handed the authority to decide what the story was about remained an open question, and Blink Twice is the reply she wrote herself: a film about who gets to forget what happens on an island, made by someone who had spent years being looked at.

Before that, The Batman gave her the most visible role of her career. Her Selina Kyle in Matt Reeves‘s film, released in 2022, was a fighter rather than a purring femme fatale, and the film grossed more than $700 million. That same year she played an agoraphobic tech worker who overhears a crime in Steven Soderbergh‘s Kimi and was named to Time’s list of the 100 most influential people. Blink Twice, which she wrote with Feigenbaum and began under its original title in 2017, reached cinemas through Amazon MGM Studios in August 2024 with Naomi Ackie and Channing Tatum in the leads. It took $48 million worldwide on a $20 million budget and drew mostly positive reviews.

In 2025 she played a version of herself in Seth Rogen‘s Apple TV+ satire The Studio, which brought her a first Primetime Emmy nomination, as guest actress in a comedy series; she did not win. She also joined Austin Butler in Darren Aronofsky‘s crime thriller Caught Stealing, which earned generally positive reviews but only $33.3 million worldwide.

Her private life has tended to run alongside the work in the tabloids. She married the actor Karl Glusman at her father’s house in Paris in 2019, and the divorce was finalised two years later. She began a relationship with Channing Tatum in 2021; they announced their engagement in 2023 and separated in 2024. She has been linked to Harry Styles since August 2025, and in April 2026 People reported that the couple were engaged, which neither has confirmed.

The months ahead put both of her jobs on the schedule at once. How to Rob a Bank, David Leitch’s heist comedy with Nicholas Hoult, opens in US cinemas on November 13, 2026, with Kravitz as Reagan Gardner. She is in New York shooting Megan Park‘s Die Alive for Apple Original Films opposite Adèle Exarchopoulos, the romantic comedy Otherwise Engaged, with Jack Whitehall, Colin Firth and Halle Berry, is due to film in spring 2027, and in 2025 she was in talks to direct How to Save a Marriage for Sony, with Robert Pattinson producing. Variety has reported that her Catwoman is not expected in The Batman Part II, due in October 2027, and no deal for her has been announced. If that holds, the role that made her most famous closes just as the one she wrote for herself, behind the camera, starts to open.