Here’s my Zoe Kravitz piece for Wonderland’s Reality issue. READ MORE

Zoe Kravitz is a Sagittarius to a T, she admits, moments after arriving to meet Wonderland at a cozy and noisy West Village cafe. “You know, a social butterfly. Flighty and late,” she says a bit hoarse. (She’s actually just a few minutes off the appointed hour.) She apologises, before ordering a soy Americano and politely requests a fruit and yoghurt plate, despite missing the breakfast menu. I’m not certain if our waiter obliges because Zoe’s a cute, well-mannered 22-year-old clad in her Village-friendly bohemian best, or because, well, her parents are Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet. 

With  scattered hand and forearm tattoos peeking out from underneath her tattered sweater, and a distressed tan trench-coat which I presume is a killer vintage find (it’s actually courtesy of her friend Alexander Wang), Kravitz seems more like an arty Parsons student than your archetypal rock star child. Once the caffeine cranks the conversation up a notch, we’re soon chatting away about the foxy waiters at our mutual favorite Williamsburg brunch spot (“Have you tried their fruit and yoghurt?” she enthuses) and squealing about our life goals of being Patti Smith and inhabiting the Chelsea hotel circa the 70s. It’s not that I’ve forgotten I’m sitting across from Zoe, last name Kravitz; I just don’t care. 

And that’s how Kravitz wants it. “I’ve developed a pretty good bullshit detector over the years,” she confesses, admitting that her famous last name has always come before her, especially in her high school days. “I think hopefully, most of the time, the more [people] got to know me the less weird it got,” she says. “A few days before school started, the kids were always like, ‘Oh my God!’ But once I got there, they thought I was pretty cool. Or that I was kind of weird,” she explains with a throaty chuckle.

Fiercely independent, Kravitz has lived on her own since 18, and says she’s always been about doing her own thing, whether it was belting out “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as a young girl in her grandmother’s living room, or becoming a  self-confessed theater geek in high school, then attending State University, New York.

Rejecting the celebrity-kid norm of pimped-out rides, prestigious private schools and rehab stints on far flung tropical islands, she currently resides in Williamsburg, the hipster capital of the world. Was it inevitable that she would go into showbiz, given her radder-than-rad parents? “It kind of happened. It wasn’t planned out,” she says. “High school ended and it was time to choose a career. I had spent all of my time acting and singing, so I gave it a shot.”

OK, her family background probably didn’t hurt her career, but it’s Kravitz’s raw talent, hard work and legit training that’s taken her from playing dress-up and singing Grease tunes with her cousins to reluctantly auditioning and nabbing the role of Angel Salvador in the forthcoming, massively-hyped X-Men: First Class. 

“My agent called and was like, ‘Can you go in for X-Men today?’ And I said, ‘No, please. There’s no point.’ Because I just didn’t think I had a shot. I was like, ‘I’m not an X-Men chick.’ I would never picture myself in it,” she says with candor and a tinge of the insecurity you’d expect from a budding actress.

“My band [Elevator Fight] had performed the night before and I was hung over.” Nonetheless, she got the role, her first in a mainstream film, for which, by the way by the way, dons “a lot of tight leather, kind of slutty costumes.” Some actresses might be perturbed by getting inside the mind of a go-go dancing mutant with insect wings, but portraying an outsider who’s battling growing pains and prejudice isn’t such a stretch for Kravitz.

“If there’s any more of an appropriate time for a story about a culture that’s not being accepted, I think it’s now,” she says. “That’s what’s so cool about the comic - it takes very human circumstances and makes them really extreme and fantastical.”

What’s next? Well, tomorrow she’s off to the South by South West festival for a screening of coming-of-age indie-drama Yelling to the Sky, which finds Kravitz in her first leading role as Sweetness, a 17-year-old student from Queens coping with abusive, tumultuous environs alongside Precious star Gabourey Sidibe.    

“The stories I’m attracted to are a little more on the real side, the interesting side,” explains Kravitz. Those include roles in a slew of indie flicks over the past few years, ranging from a counseling-obsessed teen in The Greatest (with Carey Mulligan and Susan Sarandon) to a schoolgirl whose friend is institutionalized for severe depression in dark comedy It’s Kind of a Funny Story ( with Zach Galifianakis). 

As the  buzz surrounding Kravitz continues - Is she America’s next indie darling?; was that her we saw taking a post-party nosedive on Perezhilton.com? - she’s sitting back and wryly enjoying the often vacuous, bumpy journey while keeping both feet on the ground.

Where other starlets live for blog-fame, party pics and red carpet moments,  Kravitz likes long walks across the Williamsburg bridge while jamming out on her iPod to her favorite band TV on the Radio. She can’t wait to hit up the summer concerts in Prospect Park. She’s got a slight fan-girl obsession with Jack White. When I bring up her stint as the face of T by Alexander Wang, she says she is definitely not a model, but a friend-being-a-friend. (“I’m the most awkward person in the world in a photo-shoot. I’m just like ‘Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it!’”) But, for “shits and giggles,” she fronts a rock ‘n’ roll band, Elevator Fight, (a friend pegs as “the drunken Yeah Yeah Yeahs”), in which she pens tunes about the apocalypse. “I’m lucky enough that my acting’s sustaining my life right now which is great,” she says. But being Zoe Kravitz comes with the perks of her little band booking massive gigs like SXSW and Philadelphia’s Roots picnic, even before recording a full-length debut (which they’re taking their time completing “for fun”). Sure, Kravitz is a Kravitz, and as of late, a bonafide indie darling-turned-mainstream-mutant, but her ultimate goal is still simple: “Keep on paying the rent, keep on making films that are interesting.” 

By the time we’re done with the coffee, we’ve laughed our faces off talking about pop culture: she pegs Britney Spears’s infamous shorn head  as “so punk rock” and jokingly considers Charlie Sheen a “fucking genius”.Is she planning a high-profile burnout anytime soon? “I have this weird fantasy of being this crazy lounge singer at some really shitty jazz club when I’m like 65. And I wanna drink gin and have cat hair all over me,” she smiles.