It’s 8 P.M. on a Friday at Dimes, the restaurant that lends its name to New York City’s Dimes Square, a micro-neighborhood on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side that has become the preferred meeting ground (or meme fodder, depending on your viewpoint) for artistic tastemakers. The dinner crowd is split between those dressed to impress in their best night-out pieces and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, those wearing their most lived-in outfits—as if to say they’re not here to impress anyone, even if they very much are.
Then Zoë Kravitz walks through the door in layers of black, hair slung in two loose braids and tucked under a knit striped kerchief to guard against the bitter winter chill, preternaturally achieving the look that all the other diners were going for: effortless, easy, but still incredibly cool. She tells me she chose the restaurant because it’s one of her favorites. “I love this restaurant. I love this neighborhood, and I come here a lot,” she says. “I feel like there’s just a coziness to it, and it’s a good vibe. And the food is really good.”
It’s one of many gems she’s come to love in her two decades of living in the city. Raised between Los Angeles, where her mom lived, and New York City and Miami, where her dad lived after her parents split up, NYC is the place where she now feels most at peace. “I feel like I’m part of something when I’m here,” she says. “Some people find it chaotic, but I find it calming, and I find myself fed by the energy of the city. This is a place where I can be alone, but not feel alone. It’s an incredibly special place, and I find it really inspiring. It’s not as segregated as other cities, and you’re around really different kinds of people, with different kinds of interests. Even the sound. And people go, ‘It’s noisy.’ I’m like, ‘I find it comforting.’” She stayed at a friend’s place near a beach recently, but says she found the constant sound of waves “unnerving…I want horns and people screaming.”
On many days, she says, you can spot her cruising on foot around the city, headphones in, walking over the bridge, people-watching, stopping to read and write in a café or hit a movie theater. (Her faves: Metrograph, Angelika Film Center, IFC Center, and the Regal Essex Crossing; she likes Brooklyn’s Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, too, but not the fact that it’s in a mall: “I’m always a little stoned when I go to the movies.”) In L.A., on the other hand, “You have to make a plan and no one wants to go because there’s traffic, and then after the dinner’s done, you have to call it a night,” she says. “You can’t just walk and see where the day takes you, and that’s one of my favorite things about living here.”
She arrived at our dinner fresh off a flight from L.A., where she attended the 82nd Golden Globes. She’s become more relaxed about attending high-stakes events in recent years. Where she used to feel pressure to be perfect, Kravitz now focuses on the opportunity to celebrate the art and artists she admires—like telling director Halina Reijn how much she loved a certain shot in Babygirl, or complimenting the performance that director Sean Baker captured in Anora of star Mikey Madison. “I got to talk to so many great directors and tell them how much I love their work and pick their brain, even for four minutes,” Kravitz says. “It’s become more about that than what I’m wearing.”
Of course, Kravitz is more than an admirer. With the 2024 release of her directorial debut, Blink Twice, she’s become their peer. The film, which is equal parts funny and terrifying, centers on Frida, a nail artist and cocktail waitress played by Naomi Ackie, who is invited to party on the private island of her billionaire crush, played by Channing Tatum. But once she’s there, eerie things begin to happen: Her friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) disappears, and lapses in her memory grow bigger and bigger. The brutal reveal of Blink Twice—spoiler alert—is that all the women on the island are drugged and assaulted by the men on a nightly basis.
The film’s themes fit tidily into the recent trends of “eat the rich” movies, like The Menu and Triangle of Sadness, as well as movies on female rage, like The Substance and Nightbitch. It’s also easy to draw parallels between the film and real-life events: Kravitz began writing the script with her friend E. T. Feigenbaum in 2017, the same year that accusations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein sparked a new round of the #MeToo movement, and the island setting garnered comparisons to Jeffrey Epstein. More recently, the themes became freshly relevant with the arrest of Diddy in the fall of 2024 on charges of sex trafficking, allegedly involving drug-fueled orgies known as “freak-offs.” (He has pled not guilty, and his case is scheduled to go to trial later this year.)
But despite the ripped-from-the-headlines subject matter, Kravitz cautions against imagining that Blink Twice was about any one particular abuse of power. “It’s been really interesting to see the way that it’s become very timely, but it’s based on my observation of power dynamics in general,” she adds. “I find it important to say that, not to be politically correct, but I feel like we’re letting ourselves off the hook a little too easily by trying to make this about three people. I’m like, ‘Yes, people with power abuse it. This is a thing. It happens all the time. It’s still happening. And it’s not about these one or two or three people that you think it’s about, it’s about everybody.’
- Beauty Tip: For the perfect glossy, neutral lip, try YSL Beauty Loveshine Lip Oil Stick.
“People focused a lot on the island, or the party part, or the billionaires part, but those were just devices to tell the story,” she continues. “It’s really about power dynamics and having to pretend like you’re okay when you’re not, because you’re fearful of losing your life or your job or whatever.” Kravitz says she was inspired by the kinds of abuses women have faced, going all the way back to the story of Adam and Eve. The original script was “more Lord of the Flies,” she says, but she eventually worked her way to the idea of centering on trauma and repressed memories, which is when everything clicked.
“I really wanted to highlight that in the story, so that maybe people could understand how emotionally draining it is for women, specifically, to have to pretend like we’re okay all the time,” she says. Of the decision to make the billionaire a tech guy, she adds: “After we came up with the billionaire thing, we were just like, ‘Okay, is he an actor? Is he a rock star? What is power now?’ And we realized we’re in this shift where tech billionaires are the new rock stars, in a lot of ways, which at the time felt very fresh.”
Kravitz hired actors to play against type—like the affable Tatum as the film’s villain—or to play into stereotypes, as Adria Arjona did as Sarah, a reality TV star so gorgeous that the other women see her as competition, instead of a potential ally. “As an actor, we all get stereotyped in some way. [We’re often] told, ‘This is what you’re good at, this is what you get to do.’ And so maybe after experiencing that, I subconsciously was like, ‘No, it’s so much more fun to let people do something different,’” Kravitz says. “As a woman, I wanted to write really fully dimensional characters and give them a lot of fun scenes to do.”
She compares the experience of learning to direct to becoming a parent: “I don’t have any children, but I would imagine having a child is similar: No one can prepare you for that. You have to just do it, and see what kind of parent you are and how you deal with it.
“And then as a director with my actors, you realize that not all your children are the same, and that you have to speak to them differently,” she says. “Everyone learns differently. Everyone hears things differently. Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses and insecurities, and you have to learn how to support them and what they need to hear. Some actors really need to hear ‘Good job’ after a take. Some actors don’t care. It’s really understanding that.”
Ackie says Kravitz pushed her as a performer. “She had a huge amount of trust in me, and as an actor, sometimes I struggle with confidence in what I can pull out of the bag,” she says. “Working with Zoë was such a freeing experience. It was a gift to see someone so openly exploring their excitement for storytelling in a way that reminded me of my own. She has such a purity in her love of film and music and art and architecture and design, and I was in awe of her the entire time and just wanted to give her my absolute best, because she was giving me hers.”
After years on other sets, Kravitz got to craft the kind of workplace she longed for, creating what she calls a “summer camp” vibe for the cast and crew. “I was trying to think about what my experience has been on set and what I find helpful, what I don’t find helpful, how I sometimes wish things were run,” she says. She knew she wanted to cultivate a workplace where her actors felt comfortable bringing ideas to the table and trying out new things.
It was also important to her, given the sensitive material, that everyone felt safe and that the mood on set didn’t get too dark. “I care a lot about people being comfortable and having fun and the environment being good. Specifically as a woman, I find myself making sure that everyone’s eating food and everyone’s getting what they need: Should there be some music playing on set? Would that be nice?” Kravitz says. “When people are having fun and people are fed and taken care of, they can be present with you. You want people to be happy and want to work hard for you.”
“Her energy was the thing that we all leaned on,” Ackie says of Kravitz. “There were some hard days where things went wrong and we had to do some problem-solving really quickly, and her ability to lead in the thick of it was something I still admire so much.”
Kravitz and Tatum began a romantic relationship while filming Blink Twice, and they were engaged by the fall of 2023. As his director, Kravitz drew a performance out of Tatum that viewers hadn’t seen before. He delivers a monologue at the climax of the film, looking directly down the camera’s lens with a bone- chilling intensity. “For Chan specifically, it was about how exciting it would be to see him do something so different and so surprising, and something that I knew he was so capable of,” she says.
Then, a few short months after the release of Blink Twice, Kravitz and Tatum ended their engagement. When I ask how the breakup affected how she feels about the film today, her face crumples with surprise and confusion, the idea downright incomprehensible to her. “Not at all,” she says bluntly. “I love this thing that we made together, and I care for him very much. Even when you bring up how great his performance is, it warms my heart to hear that, and I’m so happy that all of it happened. I just feel so grateful that we got to go on that journey together.”
It’s clear how much affection Kravitz still has for Tatum. “He has so much more coming, and I think he’s in a place as an actor where he’s feeling really confident and people are seeing different sides of him,” she says with a soft smile. “He’s got a lot to offer, so I’m excited for people to keep witnessing that.”
There’s no apparent bad blood here; it seems the relationship simply ran its course. But it’s a new year, and Kravitz has a lot to look forward to. Because Blink Twice took up so much of her time, she hadn’t acted since 2021, a pause she broke with a starring role opposite Austin Butler in Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming crime thriller Caught Stealing, out August 29.
As a film buff, Kravitz was drawn by the opportunity to act under Aronofsky, one of her favorite directors. The admiration cuts both ways: “From the moment I met Zoë, she felt like an old friend. She’s incredibly intelligent, insightful, creative, and stylish,” Aronofsky says. “With Caught Stealing, I needed an actor who was sensitive, sharp, and tough. It was also a role that needed a spark. Zoë was able to do it all.”
Also on the acting docket for 2025 is a cameo role in The Studio, a new comedy series directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg coming to Apple TV+ on March 26. The Studio is a send-up of the current state of Hollywood, something like a mix between Entourage and The Office, in which Rogen plays a newly promoted head of a fictional production studio who only ever seems to mess things up for the films he’s overseeing.
Kravitz was originally meant to appear as herself in just one episode, but she had so much fun on set that they invited her back to do the two-part finale, much to her delight. “I think it’s both so funny and smart, and also really accurate—I love what they’re saying about the industry and about art,” Kravitz says.
And she should know: Kravitz was an executive producer and star of Hulu’s gender-swapped take on High Fidelity, which was canceled after just one season, despite debuting in 2020 to positive reviews. “That’s where I really learned about producing and editing and writing, and man, I’m sad,” she says. “I keep on going back to Hulu and trying to get them to re-up it, but they won’t. They’re not interested.”
A more likely comeback would be a third season of HBO’s Big Little Lies. According to Kravitz, costars Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman are hard at work making that happen. “Everyone wants to do it, and we’re like, ‘Call us and tell us when and where,’” she says. “That would be amazing if that could happen this year—I would be over the moon.”
Later this spring, Kravitz will start work on the Zellner brothers’ Alpha Gang, a comedic sci-fi film about aliens who disguise themselves as a 1950s biker gang to invade Earth. But her passion right now? “I really want to keep writing and directing,” she says. “That’s the thing that I love the most, and I want to really, really focus on the next couple of years.”
She’s juggling about four different script ideas at the moment, popping in to work on one or the other when the mood strikes. “I have a lot of ideas, and the hardest part is, ‘How do I focus on what is flowing the easiest?’ Right now it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s talking to me today?’ And just vomiting out these feelings and ideas.” The most daunting part, she says, is starting. “That blank page is so intimidating. That’s where I’m at right now, but I’m trying not to freak out. I hope I’m just able to make even one other movie—just write something down.”
She’s not scared, though, of trying and failing. “My feelings don’t get hurt if the idea doesn’t come across or the idea doesn’t work,” she says. “I like that I feel confident enough to fall on my face with an idea. I think that’s what art is about.” That’s where the magic happens. “There’s a difference between being cocky and knowing to trust that you know what you’re doing,” she adds. “Creativity is like this invisible thread that you find, and then knowing I’ve got the thread, I’ve just got to keep following it. It’s going to show up, and that confidence is where the good shit is.”
Hair by Nikki Nelms for Bronner Bros.; makeup by Nina Park for YSL Beauty; manicure by Aki Hirayama for Essie; produced by Anna Inglis for Hen’s Tooth Productions; photographed on location at Economy Candy, New York; special thanks to Hotel on Rivington, New York.
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of ELLE.
