If you’ve seen much of Zoë Kravitz’s work—as one of the escaping women in Mad Max: Fury Road, as the around-the-way girl in Dope, as the moral compass of Good Kill, or as Christina in the Divergent movies—it’s hard to imagine how any moviemaker wouldn’t want to cast her. But in a new interview in Nylon (via THR ), Kravitz tells a rather shocking story about why she couldn’t land an audition in one of the decade’s biggest blockbusters:
“In the last Batman movie [The Dark Knight Rises], they told me that I couldn’t get an audition for a small role they were casting because they weren’t ‘going urban,’” she says. “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?’”
The idea of open racial discrimination (coded language or no) in modern Hollywood is a bit jaw-dropping, though it’s certainly backed up by the stats. But good on Kravitz—who’s still on the rise and not exactly in a power position to call out major studios and filmmakers—for taking on the increasingly visible and important job of name-and-shaming a discriminatory industry.