Douglas Gorenstein/NBC(NEW YORK) — Although Zoe Kravitz has proiven she can hold her own in blockbuster films — starring in Insurgent and Mad Max: Fury Road this year — the actress said she was denied an audition for a role in 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises because of her look.
“In the last Batman movie, they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,'” she explains in the August issue of Nylon. “It was like, ‘What does that have to do with anything?’ I have to play the role like, ‘Yo, what’s up, Batman? What’s going on wit chu?'”
“Black culture is so much deeper than that, but unfortunately that is what’s fed through the media. That’s what people see,” she continued. “That’s what I saw. But then I got older and listed to A Tribe Called Quest and watched films with Sidney Poitier, and heard Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. I had to un-brainwash myself. It’s my mission, especially as an actress.”
Still, Kravitz said she understands why there are so many misconceptions about black culture in the U.S., especially since she said she was one of few African-Americans in her predominantly white school growing up.
“I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in,” she says. “I didn’t identify with black culture, like, I didn’t like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn’t into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.”
The daughter of rock musician and actor Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet will next be seen on the big screen in the Insurgent sequel, Allegiant Part 1, out March 18, 2016.
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