Zoe Kravitz Always Lands on Her Feet

She was already one of the coolest people alive. But it wasn't until this year when she played Catwoman (in The Batman) and directed her first movie (Pussy Island) that Kravitz finally felt like she made it.

- By Gabriella Paiella. Photographs by Steven Klein

The Upper East Side is Out in full force at the Neue Galerie, a shrine to Austro Germanic expressionism tucked inside a palatial Louis XIII-style mansion, on this gloomy fall afternoon. The coats are sumptuous shades of navy and brown. The hair is coiffed and gray. The elegant silk scarves are mandatory. The patrons have stepped inside the filigree-iron doors and up the dramatically curved marble staircase to be transported, through the evocative power of art, to the gilded refinement of turn-of-the century Vienna. Also, to eat the café’s 36 Wiener schnitzel.

Zoé Kravitz glides in wearing a long black coat over an all-black ensemble with her hair slicked up in a ballerina bun, looking like Catwoman decided to settle down in a classic six on Central Park. Her face is what happens when you combine the DNA of two of the best-looking people on earth Lenny Kravitz, Lisa Bonet). Her mind, however, is somewhere else: Pussy Island.

The 33-year-old actor is midway through editing her directorial debut, about a cocktail waitress named Frida Naomi Ackie) who accompanies a nefarious tech billionaire Channing Tatum) to his hedonistic private island. The film occupies her thoughts day and night. My brain just doesn’t stop,” she says. It’s screaming about it.”

Kravitz, a longtime Williamsburg resident, suggested we meet up here before she retreats back to the editing suite. The museum has been one of her favorite places since she first visited on a high school field trip and was blown away by its collection of Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt paintings. All these years later, a Schiele nude is her phone background. Specifically, with Schiele, there’s this grotesque, almost ugly-beautiful thing. Even with the Klimt pieces, the sadness in their eyes...” she says.