The lovely Zoe Kravitz covers the August 2015 issue of NYLON magazine and in her spread, the singer/actress talks about once identifying solely with her white side and how she learned to embrace her African American side.
via NYLON:
“As one of few black kids in her predominately white school, she remembers saying things like, ‘I’m just as white as y’all,’ to her classmates. ‘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.’ But as time went on, her views shifted. ‘Black culture is so much deeper than that,’ she says, ‘but unfortunately that is what’s fed through the media. That’s what people see. 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.’”
She also discusses struggling with bulimia and anorexia, at one point dropping down to just 90 lbs for a role where she ironically played a character suffering from the same disorders.
While there have been many roles she fought hard to get, there was one she was hesitant to take: playing a young woman with an eating disorder in April’s The Road Within. “It scared the shit out of me,” says Kravitz. “I was worried about my health. There was, 100 percent, a voice in my head that said, ‘You get to be really thin, and it’s OK.’ I felt that I could be like, ‘I’m not eating anything, and it’s for a job.’” But the prospect of exorcising old demons won out over the fear of revisiting them, and she took the role. “It wasn’t as simple as that before, during, or after, but it made me confront the fact that I still had a problem,” she admits. As a result of dropping down to a “scarily thin” 90 pounds for the part, Kravitz got shingles and lost her voice. “I couldn’t sing, which was a wake-up call telling me that I couldn’t treat my body that way and expect it to be fine. My hatred for my body and the way I looked was backfiring and taking away what I loved. I heard that so loud and clear.”
Read the entire cover story HERE.
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