Zoe Kravitz Was Told She Was Too "Urban" To Audition For Catwoman In 'The Dark Knight Rises'
"The Batman" hit theaters on March 4 and it's the movie that everyone is talking about. Zoë Kravitz stars as Catwoman alongside Robert Pattinson, but she opened up recently about the path it took for her to arrive at this role.
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This isn't the first time Zoë Kravitz was interested in playing the role of Catwoman. In a recent interview with the Guardian, she opened up about her previous efforts to take on this character in another wildly popular Batman movie.
Zoë Kravitz Says She Was Blocked From Auditioning Because She Was Too "Urban"
Rejection isn't a foreign concept to anyone who has found success in Hollywood. Zoë is certainly one of the many actresses who has been turned down for a role. When she expressed interest in auditioning as Catwoman for Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight Rises, she wasn't even offered the chance to read for the part. The reason? Zoë was told that she was too "urban" for this particular portrayal of Catwoman.
“I don’t know if it came directly from Chris Nolan,” she said. “I think it was probably a casting director of some kind, or a casting director’s assistant."
She also went on to say that it's been difficult as a black bi-racial woman in Hollywood. "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," she admitted.
That made her recent victory all the more sweet. When she was granted the role of Catwoman, she was thrilled. “It was crazy,” she recalled. “My phone was blowing up more than any birthday I’ve ever had.”
Zoë also opened up about how difficult it was for her to embrace her true self when she was younger. “I felt really insecure about my hair, relaxing it, putting chemicals in it, plucking my eyebrows really thin," she shared. "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 has found much confidence and success recently, though, and the reviews for The Batman seem to be quite favorable.