‘The Batman’ star Zoë Kravitz came up with Catwoman having longer nails

There’s a lot to like about the newest The Batman trailer released Monday morning, including the dedication of screen time given to Zoë Kravitz, playing Selina Kyle (aka Catwoman). She’s appearing to share some onscreen chemistry with co-star Robert Pattinson, who plays Bruce Wayne (obviously aka Batman) in the movie.

Indeed, it seems that Catwoman will have a fairly substantial role in the upcoming film, if some of the stunning marketing imagery of the pair and a German theater’s synopsis that Selina will be the childhood friend of Bruce are any indication.

And what’s also interesting is to peek behind the curtain to see just how engaged Kravitz got in bringing her character to life.

In a recent interview with BuzzFeed, Kravitz described creating the look and feel of her character as a collaborative process. In fact, due to quarantine stunting production, the delay served as the inspiration for Kravitz pitching to director Matt Reeves for having Selina sport really long, but natural, “bitchy” nails.

“We developed the costume together as a team, and actually, the nails weren’t originally planned. We shot two months before quarantine and everything shut down, so in that time, I started to grow my nails out because we couldn’t get manicures and then I had this idea to take it further…so I called Matt and was like, I have this idea, we should do crazy, bitchy, wonderful scary nails that looked like claws. No nail polish on them, so they looked more like claws, and we were able to incorporate it last minute.” 

This turned out to be something of a blessing and a curse for the actor. On the one hand, she was able to add a personal touch to the character. But on the other hand, the very hands-on performance became a whole lot trickier, as she relayed:

“There was also some gun training — I had to be able to shoot the gun accurately, load it, and reshoot it, WITH these crazy-long nails … so learning how to shoot a gun without breaking a nail was a new skill I developed.”

The Batman hits theaters March 4, 2022.