Zoë Kravitz is opening up about her relationship with Channing Tatum and their plans for happily ever after. In a lengthy profile for Esquire, the 35-year-old reflects on the journey to her directorial debut, Blink Twice, and how her fianceé fits into her life.
ET confirmed last October that Zoë and Channing, 44, had quietly gotten engaged more than two years after first sparking romance rumors. The pair met while working on Blink Twice in 2021.
“He’s adaptable,” Zoë tells Esquire of how she and Channing navigate their bicoastal relationship and her insomniac nature. “I sleep differently when he’s home.”
As Zoë recalls, she’d never met Channing before sending the script to his production company. The two exchanged “note calls” as Zoë tweaked the script until it got to a place where the producer and star was ready to sign on, and the rest is history. Sometime after the star accepted his role in Blink Twice, but before filming began, he and Zoë became a couple.
Zoë’s proud papa, Lenny Kravitz, has been a strong advocate for the couple since they went public.
During a June appearance on the Zoë Ball and Friends podcast, the rocker opened up about how well Channing has fit in with the family since he and Zoë got serious, even telling the host that “we’re going to have a wedding next year.”
But Zoë waves that away, implying that her father took her words too literally. “It’s literally something we’ve said in passing,” she tells Esquire. “Like, maybe I said, ‘Next year would be cool.'”
While Zoë doesn’t have a wedding date to offer, she tells the outlet that she feels certain about the pair’s future, which will probably not include more children.
“For a long time, I felt like there was something wrong with me,” she says. “I was waiting for this light to go off in my head, and it never did. When you’re younger, you’re like, ‘Well, I can’t have kids. I’m too young! It’d be crazy.’ I had to actually look at what do I want.”
Zoë shares that as she’s gotten older, her friend group has shifted as their lives changed via marriage and kids. As someone who doesn’t see herself procreating, it can feel isolating, she admits.
“For a lot of people that have children, it is this giant, life-changing event — and I do think there is a certain amount of focus and respect that they should get from their community,” she says, adding that she wants the same respect for her accomplishments that don’t involve children. “There’s a lot of pressure on women to have children, and there’s a feeling that if you don’t, you don’t have purpose here. But this movie, it feels like I gave birth.”
Blink Twice is a psychological thriller directed and co-written by Zoë. It stars Channing as Slater King, a tech billionaire who meets cocktail waitress Frida (Naomi Ackie) at his fundraising gala. He invites her to join him and his friends on a vacation to his private island, but Frida soon finds out that paradise isn’t all that it seems.
Working on the film became a bit of an obsession for Zoë. “I’d be having conversations, but instead of listening, I’d be thinking about a scene,” she says of her time editing the film.
And now that the “child” that got her through “a marriage and a divorce, a pandemic and a global shutdown, and a budding flame turned true romance” is about to be released into the world? “It’s sad and weird,” she says. “It’s been an obsession.”
But the director tells Esquire she’s very happy with the end result. And she appeared more than ready to introduce the public to her creation when she and Channing made their black carpet debut at the Blink Twice premiere on Aug. 8.
During the premiere, Zoë took “just one second to talk about Channing f**king Tatum.” She read aloud a sweet thank-you dedicated to the film’s star and her fiancé.
“From producing to performing to the pep talks to holding my head or my feet while I cried on the bathroom floor because I thought I f**ked it all up, thank you for letting me be a complete OCD psycho-control freak,” Zoë said ahead of the screening at Los Angeles’ DGA Theatre. “Thank you for your patience. Making this film with you has been an awfully great adventure.”
She continued, “Thank you for trusting me to female direct you. It’s really very cool to get to make a movie, but when you get to do it with the love of your life it’s even cooler.”
Zoë also thanked the rest of the cast and crew who worked on the project.
On the carpet, they each spoke with ET about what it was like working together.
“I think there is so much trust there,” Zoë explained, “and you’re able to go to places that maybe you couldn’t go with someone that you maybe don’t know as well.”
“So it was a really beautiful experience to work together creatively,” she added.
For Channing, getting the chance to act under the direction of the woman he loves and getting to collaborate together was a relationship-cementing experience.
“It was really interesting, because we started as friends just working on a project that we both really believe in,” Channing told ET. “When things start in that creative place… you just respect each other’s point of view, you respect each other’s mind, each other’s experience in life.”
“I now don’t know what I would do creating without her,” he continued. “Everybody was like, ‘You sure you want to go create with your partner?’ But I actually suggest that to almost everyone now, ’cause you really get to know who that person is and what they are to you and who they are to you when you’re in the trenches.”
“You go, ‘Alright, I need to have your perspective right now. Tell me tell me what to do, tell me how to do it. Tell me what I don’t know and what I’m not seeing,'” he added.
Zoë’s romance with Channing is her first since her public split from ex-husband Karl Glusman. The two ended their relationship after 18 months of marriage in 2021. Meanwhile, Channing was previously married to his Step Up co-star, Jenna Dewan, from 2009 to 2019, and they share daughter Everly, 11.
Blink Twice hits theaters Aug. 23.
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