It’s even more surprising given her illustrious IMDB profile. Zoë is an Emmy award-nominated actor, who also has credits as a writer and director. This is someone who threw Alexander Skarsgård down the stairs in Big Little Lies. We’re talking about Catwoman! And then there are her parents – the eternally leather-clad rocker Lenny Kravitz and actor Lisa Bonet – who helped define ’90s pop culture. In a way, she has always been part of public consciousness. And yet, today she is anonymous.
“It’s an energy thing,” she says, explaining why no one is presently accosting us. We’re now at downtown eatery Dimes, two days after The Big Bowling Reprieve. She’s wearing a navy crewneck sweater by The Row, vintage black tailored trousers and a waterproof Arc’teryx hoodie. It’s pretty packed here and the acoustics are terrible – not ideal for an interview – but it’s homey and she’s comfortable. This is what it’s like to be a part of Zoë’s world: chatting with the Dimes waitstaff on a Friday afternoon and washing down salmon and black rice with turmeric ginger ale. “For the most part, in my neighbourhood, I’ve lived here forever, so I’m around.”
Maybe it’s because she is photographed wearing sunglasses all the time and looks really good in a bucket hat, or because she lives in Brooklyn and used to be in a band. Maybe it’s just “an energy thing”. Whatever it is, there is a specific mythology surrounding her – a quality that colours a lot of her first encounters. “She came to a fitting with me once in a zip-up nylon track jacket under a vintage shearling coat, with brown slacks and loafers, with a set of keys hanging around her neck on a long lanyard, and to this day I still think about how cool she looked in that outfit,” recalls stylist Danielle Goldberg. “But the truth is, it had nothing to do with the outfit, it was her. Zoë just makes everything cool because she is.”
“The word ‘cool’ gets thrown around a lot,” says Zoë. “It’s something that is written about me or it’s what people, when they get to know me, tell me that they thought I was going to be like. People might tell me, “Oh, wow, I was intimidated when I first met you” and “I thought you were going to be like this.” And to me, it’s really surprising because it feels far away from who I am.”
