Nocturnes

Zoë Kravitz is bright-eyed and serene, curled into a posh love seat at the Ham Yard Hotel in the heart of London as morning light pours in through the windows. “Between 1 and 5 in the morning is when I get the best ideas,” she says. Just hours earlier, she was dancing through the vaulted halls of the Tate Modern, fêting the fourth edition of Dom Pérignon’s annual Révélations series, which this year unveiled “Creation is an Eternal Journey,” a cinematic portrait and immersive exhibition tracing the Maison’s legacy across time and place. Photographed by Collier Schorr and filmed by Camille Summers-Valli, the campaign features Kravitz alongside a cast of iconoclasts including Tilda Swinton, Anderson .Paak, Takashi Murakami, Iggy Pop, Alexander Ekman, and Clare Smyth, each invited to answer one question: What does it mean to create? 

At the Tate, the evening unfolded in three acts: a multi-sensory showcase of archival relics and vineyard light; a candlelit dinner by Smyth paired with 2008 Plénitude 2—a rare cuvée over 15 years in the making, served ahead of its global release; and finally, a euphoric afterparty soundtracked by .Paak. At one point, Swinton read an original poem. By midnight, the room had transformed into a cathedral of movement. 

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Kravitz, who grew up around champagne lore (her father once served as Dom Pérignon’s creative director), now joins the Maison’s ongoing mythology in her own right. For decades, the amber elixir has remained uniquely, almost stubbornly, tethered to celebration, its glamor captivating some of the most artistic minds of the last century. Ian Fleming made it Bond’s drink of choice. Even Truman Capote, who famously disdained champagne, made an exception when Elizabeth Taylor offered him a glass on the Cleopatra set, saying: “I only ever drink Dom.” And then there’s Marilyn Monroe, glass in hand, posing with Vintage 1953 in her last ever shoot with Bert Stern in 1962. 

Sitting across from me now, Kravitz’s presence is almost weightless, like someone who’s learned to let the air in. I ask what chapter she’s in creatively these days. “A tender one,” she says. “I made this transition from acting to directing very recently, and now I’m figuring out what I want to do. It’s a really exciting place, I’m just open to what comes next.” Her trust in timing mirrors Dom Pérignon’s own philosophy, where creation isn’t linear. In 2023, no vintage was declared at all, lost to heavy rains; the following year nearly met the same fate. That we were drinking 2008 at all felt like a small miracle, its arrival a reminder that excellence takes time and a certain tolerance for uncertainty. Kravitz, too, has taken her time, moving from standout roles in HBO’s Big Little Lies (2017-present) and The Batman (2022) to her slow-burning directorial debut, Blink Twice, last year. 

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“I see life as a spiral,” she says, echoing the Maison’s cyclical creative ethos. “You start in the purest form of yourself, and then as you age, you spiral away from that. But the second half of your life is about spiraling back toward who you really are.” When I ask if there’s been a moment worth toasting, she lights up. “There’s a photo somewhere in my phone of me sitting in a park with a bottle of Dom from when I first received funding for Blink Twice,” she says, smiling so openly I catch myself smiling back. “That’s what it’s for: when dreams come true. It marks those moments in a special way.” In choosing what feels worth pursuing, Kravitz tells me she gravitates towards originality. “When I come across something that has a real point of view, that shakes me in a way I haven’t been shaken before,” she says. “That’s what I think all art should do.”

Off-set, Kravitz’s days move slowly back in New York. She sleeps in. Then it’s coffee and a long walk through the neighborhood, music in her ears if the weather’s good. Brunch comes late—eggs at 3:00 p.m., and always pancakes for the table—at Café Mogador, Dimes, or Thai Diner. She loves a movie theater—Metrograph, IFC Center, or Angelika Film Center, depending on what’s playing. Still, for all her rituals of rest, something’s always around the corner. This year she’s stepping back in front of the lens with Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, a gritty crime caper set in 1990s East Village, where she stars as an EMT opposite Austin Butler; and she will begin filming David Leitch’s upcoming 2026 heist film How to Rob a Bank, reuniting her with Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) co-star Nicholas Hoult. Kravitz is also in talks to direct her next feature, How to Save a Marriage, written by Ross Evans and produced by Batman co-star Robert Pattinson under his Icki Eneo Arlo banner with partner Brighton McCloskey. 

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At 36, Kravitz is somewhere in the middle of the spiral she mentions—old enough to have stepped away from who she once was, and just beginning to circle back. Her creative life, too, follows this cycle: instinctive, self-guided, often most alive when something goes wrong. “That’s when the magic happens: When things fall apart and you have to rethink everything,” she says. ”It’s usually when you land somewhere better than you imagined.” When I ask if she lives by any rules, without hesitation, she says kindness. As for the rest? “Go ahead and break them all.”