Interview: Lenny Kravitz, musician and actor

Any active role Kravitz himself plays in this phenomenon is negligible. He merely walks into a room, but he might as well be walking on stage, such is his sudden, weighty presence. When he strolls into a suite in London’s Soho Hotel, everyone, myself included, leaps up. A handful of publicists, a make-up artist, cameraman and this journalist all awkwardly stand to attention before the moment passes and everyone goes about the business of pretending that Lenny Kravitz didn’t just walk into the room.

Perhaps it’s because he does so wholly embody the appearance of a rock star that we all get momentarily giddy. Ask anyone to imagine what a rock god should look like and they would describe 47-year-old Lenny Kravitz as he stands before me today, right down to the spray-on jeans, big black boots and rows of earrings.

Today he wears layers of draped dark fabric, topped, naturally, with a leather jacket. A tangle of beads swings over a deep v-neck which exposes a valley of smooth chest and a sliver of a tattoo, one of many. His hair is closely cropped, his face be-stubbled and he wears sunglasses as big and shiny as a pair of chunky brass door knobs.

They have the impenetrable silvery reflection of a one-way mirror in a police interrogation room, and I’m on the wrong side of the glass. When I look at him I can see more of myself than I can of the man behind the shades, and I wonder for a moment if he’ll remove them at all. Just as I’m beginning to entertain the uncomfortable idea that I may have to request that he take them off (is that like asking Boy George to remove his hat, I wonder, or suggesting Prince kicks off his Cuban heels?) he whips them off as he shakes my hand.

There’s an intimacy in seeing the eyes of a person who normally conceals them. They’re serious and intense, one eyelid marginally lower than the other, giving him a permanent questioning look. Minus the shades I immediately think of his film roles; to see him without them is almost to see him in character.

Despite acting experience as a child, Kravitz has only returned to the medium in the last two years, having enjoyed a successful career in the music industry, spanning over two decades. There was a modest part as a nurse in the 2009 film Precious, played with quiet understatement to critical acclaim, and now there’s the role of Cinna, friend to Jennifer Lawrence’s heroine in The Hunger Games, based on the hugely popular series of books for young adults by Suzanne Collins.

Set in a future where teenagers are forced to fight to the death in an elaborate game for public entertainment, the books have enjoyed success of Twilight-esque proportions, and the film is set to be one of the biggest releases of 2012.

Which brings us to this London hotel room. He’s on a world tour linked to his latest album, Black and White America, and he played a gig in the city last night so I’ve got him for a window to talk about The Hunger Games before he jets off for his next show.

“Can someone turn the air conditioning off please?” he requests, tapping his throat by way of an apology for the inconvenience. “I’m on tour.” I can see why he wants to look after those vocal chords. Even his speaking voice is rich and smooth, with a low, seductive burr to it. He’s tired, he explains: “I had the show last night, then afterwards I had some friends come by. I didn’t get to bed until five or six, so it was a long night.”

I’d expect nothing less, though I note that not a trace of fatigue shows on his face. He is fresh, disarmingly handsome and looks at least a decade younger than his 47 years. I mutter some sort of an apology for the early hour, but he interrupts me with an an encouraging smile: “No, no. Do your thing.”

As unusual as it might seem to see Kravitz on the big screen, he comes from an acting family. His mother, Roxie Roker, was a successful actress in the 1970s, appearing on the sitcom The Jeffersons, and his father, Sy Kravitz, was a television news producer. The young Lenny Kravitz worked in TV, theatre and commercials, but by 16 he had chosen to focus entirely on music.

His father also worked as a jazz producer, so the family home was often visited by music legends including Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. His parents listened to Motown, R&B, classical and blues music. Then, when the family moved to LA in 1974, a ten-year-old Kravitz got his first taste of rock ‘n’ roll when he started listening to, among others, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and Led Zeppelin.

His family were supportive of his desire to pursue a career in music, but urged him to be practical. “My mother said, ‘that’s fine, just have something to fall back on’.” He pauses and smiles. “But I never did. Fall back on what? If I didn’t do this I’d play on the street. There was nothing else I wanted to do.”

His multiple musical influences merged into a style that was a mish-mash of rock, soul, funk and reggae, and he spent ten years having his music rejected as either “too black” or “too white”. Mixed race, with a black mother and a Jewish father, he never fitted in a neat box, racially or musically, but he kept knocking on doors until one opened, and by the early nineties he was a worldwide star. Twenty-two years on he has nine hit albums and multiple awards under his belt. “It seemed that acting was where I was going,” he says. “But music was my passion and so at a certain point I decided to stop acting and go for the music 100 per cent. Throughout my career I’ve been offered roles just because, you know, I have a name and people think, ‘oh well, we’ll put him in a movie’. And for me that wasn’t the reason to do it. They were always very stereotypical roles, things I wasn’t interested in so I never went for it.”

A chance meeting with director Lee Daniels in a New York restaurant changed his mind. He was offered a small role in Precious, filming the scenes in less than two days. “I was just reminded of how much I actually enjoy [acting] as well as of the contrasts to my musical life,” he says. “It was really satisfying because my music is all about me. It’s very self indulgent. I produce it, I play the instruments. I write and arrange it. It’s my thing completely. But with acting it’s all about the director’s vision, so to be in this place where it has nothing to do with anything except delivering something for somebody else, I love that. And I just got hungry for it again.”

Hunger Games director Gary Ross liked the measured sensitivity with which he played the role and felt he could bring the same qualities to the character of Cinna, who acts as stylist, mentor and friend to protagonist Katniss Everdeen.

Each of the teenage competitors in the perverse game is allocated a stylist, and unlike the rest, Cinna is “quite subdued but quite on point” according to Kravitz, his only nod to flamboyance a slick of gold liner on each eyelid.

It’s a role which spoke to the aesthete in him. Passionate about photography and style, Kravitz is regularly spotted in the front row at fashion shows and has his own interior design business. He dresses with wit and style, wearing a black leather kilt to play on stage in Scotland in 2009 (“Only a real man can wear a skirt, right?”).

Mostly, however, the role of Cinna is the next step in the process of a return to acting after Precious allowed him to dip his toe back into that particular pool. It’s a bigger part, a bigger film, a bigger commitment. And somebody else is calling the shots.

When he recorded his last album, he retreated to the Bahamas for months, living in a trailer by the beach with his dog Leroy. Stepping onto a film set with the magnitude of The Hunger Games must surely have been like going from being a one-man band to a member of an orchestra?

“Well, true,” he says. “That’s what it is, because in the recordings it’s me. I do what I want. When I’m on stage I can stop and say what I want. It’s kind of like stand-up comedy; one guy and a mic. But I like being in an orchestra. I like being part of an ensemble. That was always my desire but I ended up being a solo artist.”

Being just one cog in a big machine, was it a case of checking his ego at the door, so to speak? He appears to bristle a little at this. “No,” he says simply. “I check my ego at the door daily. I don’t let that get in the way of anything. I’m quite humbled by being able to do what I do, whether it’s music, film or anything else. I know that it’s a gift so I don’t have that ego problem, thank God. It’s not nice.” Fair enough.

Acting, it appears, will continue to run in the Kravitz family. His 23-year-old daughter Zoe – the product of a six-year marriage to Cosby Show actress Lisa Bonet – is pursing a career in film and television. The two are famously close. After he split from her mother, she lived with him from the age of 11 and only recently flew the nest. “I don’t realise [how close we are] until friends of hers say things like, ‘God I wish my dad and I were like that’. To me it’s normal. But it’s not normal to most people.”

Kravitz was, he says, “a momma’s boy”. He had an incredibly strong bond with his mother, who died in 1995. “She loved that I was doing music,” he says, “and she got to see me become successful and that’s beautiful. I wish she was here to see where I am now and just to live life with me. But she always said, ‘I think at some point you’ll be a good actor’. She knew I would come back to it.” In turn, his mother enjoyed a close relationship with her own father, which he believes may be the source of his friendship with Zoe.

“My mother and her father – my grandfather – were best friends,” he says. “My grandfather lived down the hill from us, a ten-minute walk, and he’d be up at our house all day. They’d be talking, arguing, laughing, debating and eating. And then he’d walk home. An hour later and my Mom’s on the phone. I’m like, ‘who are you talking to?’ She was talking to my grandfather.” He laughs. “I’m like, ‘what are you doing? He was here all day!’ They were just so close and now my daughter and I are like that. It’s funny. It’s great.”

I wonder what motivates him after more than two decades at the top of the music industry, how he still finds the drive to do what he does and do it well. He begins to shake his head as I’m speaking. “I’m more hungry now than I was when I started,” he says. “There was a period of time for a couple of years when I wasn’t sure. It started when I made the [2004] Baptism album. There’s a lot of subject matter on that record where I’m questioning my life and what I’m doing. I was a little thrown off and I had to find that place again.”

Isolating himself to make Black and White America did the job. Spending time alone, reflecting and living simply, he says allowed him to find himself once again. “I realised,” he says with a shrug, “that what I actually love is what I’ve been doing. I just kind of lost perspective a little bit.

“Now I’m hungry. I feel like I’m just getting started, that the first 22 years was a great education and the next 22 years is going to be like, ‘OK now it’s time to develop in whatever I do.’ ”

And our time is up. He shakes my hand with a wide smile, the mirrored shades (the source of all his powers, perhaps?) go back on and he’s hidden from view once again. He walks out of the room, taking that mega presence with him, and the atoms settle back into place.

• The Hunger Games (12A) is on general release from Friday 23 March.