Zoe Kravitz on Big Little Lies, feminism & friendship with Reese Witherspoon

Yeah, we’ve all become great friends and had an incredible time working together. It was a really cool thing to work with such amazing women who are supportive both on and off set. They’ve all become great friends of mine. Shailene has been a good friend of mine for a long time and Laura and Nicole are amazing women and Reese has really become one of my dear, dear friends; I look up to her and admire her a lot. I think she is an amazing person.

It’s important for women to empower each other. The idea behind the Women Are Smarter campaign was that all the proceeds went to Planned Parenthood which is an amazing thing and it was just about saying something quite confident and almost arrogant and silly, yet positive about women. The response was so interesting because some people got so upset - it just seemed so silly because there are men going around doing things all the time that have no repercussions and I wear a shirt that says ‘Women Are Smarter’ and there’s a problem – it’s so interesting to me. It doesn’t upset me, it just highlights the problem itself.

Yes, it is impossible!

It was really fun and that’s what I look for when reading a script, something different. You don’t want to play the same person over and over again. It was really exciting to put a costume on and feel like a completely different person.

Absolutely – we had so much fun making it and it was so great to again be surrounded by such amazing, intelligent and funny women that were so supportive. My experience so far of these ensemble casts of women has been so positive and the amount of sisterhood and and love and encouragement has just given me so much faith in women and women in the arts working together.

I love the idea of sharing a story through a photograph; I think that’s what makes good photography. So Canon approached me and asked what my idea of summer and storytelling is – they see me as a storyteller which is a very flattering thing as that’s something I aim to do through everything I do. All art is an expression and I think storytelling is at the heart of that. And I love the idea of the 365 Days of Summer idea because I think that summer really is the most magical time and it’s when amazing things can happen. And living in New York city too, every day can have an adventure. I like the idea of using photography to tell a story rather than just posting a selfie or something.

New York has become such a part of my personality and affects the way I live my life. I think the city is all about spontaneity and from a very early age I was able to be on my own because of how the city works; you don’t have to learn to drive or anything, you can just take the subway and walk around. It’s very people-friendly.

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I have literally just cut it this short so I am trying to focus on this before I think of what I am doing next but it feels really great to have short hair. It feels so freeing and it’s really important for women to challenge what is feminine and what it means to be a woman. For me, I definitely think having long hair is associated with looking and feeling feminine. So it’s been really good for me to have to channel my femininity in different ways and not just in an aesthetic way. I don’t really think femininity is about what’s on the outside or what gender you are even – it’s an emotion, a feeling and a quality.

We work together, me, Fernando, Oscar De La Renta and my stylist Andrew. We started with a sketch. They had sent me a sketch that was just so totally on point with what I was into and what I was feeling. It was inspired by Audrey Hepburn. The shape of the cape bit was sort of our ode to Commes De Garcons. And then we had these big real roses which were amazing. For me the dress really spoke for itself so there was the idea to do really simple makeup. Audrey Hepburn was a big inspiration for sure.

Zoë Kravitz launches Canon’s 365 Days of Summer competition to find a storyteller who will spend a year traveling the world identifying and living a new story every day. Zoë launches the competition by telling her own summer story which you can see here. To enter, simply share your most memorable summer picture on Instagram with the story behind it (no more than 50 characters), tagging @CanonUK and #LiveForTheStory