Zoë Kravitz shares a few words on her internet-maligned Oscars Slap take
"It's a scary time to have an opinion," the actor laments
In the hours and days following the 2022 Oscars, when “The Slap” became the singular, universal nomenclature for an unforgettable confrontation between Will Smith and Chris Rock, not even Hollywood’s most impenetrable cool kids were safe from derision.
At the top of that list: Zoë Kravitz, who decried Smith’s slap with a pointed Instagram from the ceremony captioned, “here’s a picture of my dress at the show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now.” Internet response (and ridicule) was decisive and supercharged by the already-chaotic online moment (Kravitz eventually deleted the post). These days, however, it appears she’s trying to make peace with the past fanfare.
“I have very complicated feelings around it,” she says in a new interview with The Wall Street Journal. “I wish I had handled that differently. And that’s okay.” Although Kravitz has her own regrets about the situation, she also expressed that the circumstances around her choice to take down the posts felt somewhat “scary.”
“It’s a scary time to have an opinion or to say the wrong thing or to make controversial art or statements or thoughts or anything,” she tells writer Hunter Harris. “It’s mostly scary because art is about conversation. That should, in my opinion, always be the point. The internet is the opposite of conversation. The internet is people putting things out and not taking anything in.”
Kravitz also hints that the incident (and simply where she’s at currently in life) gave her the legs to let go of pleasing the internet and focus on her creative endeavors. Kravitz is currently at work directorial debut Pussy Island, a thriller stacked with an ensemble cast including Naomi Ackie, Simon Rex, Christian Slater, Geena Davis, Alia Shawkat, Kyle MacLachlan, and Kravitz’s current paramour Channing Tatum.
“I think I’m in a place right now where I don’t want to express myself through a caption or a tweet,” she continues. “I want to express myself through art.”