Zoë Kravitz Calls Out "Weird, Racist People" She Encountered While Filming 'Big Little Lies'
The actor opens up about her experience in the film industry.
Zoë Kravitz caught our attention after sharing that she played Catwoman bisexually, and now the actor has more tea to spill on her time in the film industry. When filming Big Little Lies, Kravitz felt “a little uncomfortable,” she told The Guardian. The show is about a group of well-off mothers living in suburbia who get caught up in a murder investigation. Kravitz recalled visiting bars local to the filming location in Monterey, California, and encountering “weird racist people.”
This isn’t the only time Kravitz has had to deal with racially based issues during her time as an actor. 10 years ago, she wanted to audition for a small role in The Dark Knight Rises and was “told that they were not going ‘urban’ on the part.” Kravitz said on her social media, “This is something I heard a lot 20 years ago — it was a very different time.” The word “urban” was often used to describe Black people in low-income urban areas.
“Being a woman of color and being an actor and being told at that time that I wasn’t able to read because of the color of my skin, and the word urban being thrown around like that, that was what was really hard about that moment,” she told The Guardian.
Ironically, her role on the show Big Little Lies was originally meant for a white woman, but according to Kravitz, the role came right on time. All of the roles she was being sent at the time “were about the first Black woman to make a muffin or something. Even though those stories are important to tell, I also want to open things up for myself as an artist.”
And she’s right. Headlines about Black women in film are usually centered around being the first in their line, highlighting a lack of diversity that still exists within the industry. For example, Veronica Taylor was the first dark-skinned woman to be casted for a recurring role on the HBO Max show Euphoria. Taylor shared, “When I have different people in my DMs and stuff telling me how much it means that I’m on this show, it makes me happy. But then it also makes me sad because I wish that we didn’t have to feel so happy to see representation … I hope to see dark-skinned women on the screen and be represented in every light, in every beautiful way.”
