Zoë Kravitz Was Told She Looked Too ‘Urban’ For ‘The Dark Knight’
Zoë Kravitz says that she was denied an audition for The Dark Knight Rises due to the color of her skin. The only daughter of actress Lisa Bonet and musician Lenny Kravitz discussed a bad casting experience she had prior to landing her Catwoman/Selina Kyle role in The Batman alongside Robert Pattinson. She told The Observer how she planned to audition for a role in the 2012 Batman film The Dark Knight Rises but was turned down because she was deemed too “urban” for the film.
“I don’t know if it came directly from Chris Nolan. I think it was probably a casting director of some kind, or a casting director’s assistant. … 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,” said Kravitz.
Her star parents also gave her advice and made her feel comfortable in her own skin by “[breaking] down boundaries in a lot of ways” as they “both dealt with being artists who didn’t act or dress or look or sound the way a Black person was supposed to act in terms of what white people specifically were comfortable with.”
“I was uncomfortable with my Blackness. It took me a long time to not only accept it but to love it and want to scream it from the rooftops,” she said, adding that her parents “focused on trying to make sure I understood that despite the color of my skin I should be able to act or dress or do whatever it is I want to do.”
The star added that she came to have a positive perspective on rejections: “Even though it’s sometimes hard to see that in the moment, usually a few years later, you’re like, ‘Okay, this is why this didn’t happen.’ ”
The Batman is in theaters now.
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