Earlier this year, Zoë Kravitz made waves with her cheeky response to Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Now, the actor is speaking out about how she reacted to the moment.
Following the Oscars in March, Kravitz took to Instagram to share since-deleted photos of her in a dress from the evening, with one being captioned, "Here's a picture of my dress at the show where we are apparently assaulting people on stage now." But in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, the "Batman" actor wishes she had approached the situation differently.
“I’m torn about what to say right now, because I’m supposed to just talk about it; I have very complicated feelings around it,” she said. “I wish I had handled that differently. And that’s OK.”
Many social media users had a negative response to the actor's commentary on the controversial Oscars moment, and she ultimately decided to delete her posts.
“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 told The Wall Street Journal. “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.”
Still, she learned an important lesson after receiving so much backlash for her comments.
“I was reminded that I’m an artist. Being an artist is not about everybody loving you or everyone thinking you’re hot. It’s about expressing something that will hopefully spark a conversation or inspire people or make them feel seen,” she said.
Kravitz plans to take a bit of a different approach moving forward, though, saying that she doesn't want to express herself through "a caption or a tweet" but rather "through art."