How Zoe Kravitz Transformed Into Catwoman With a Little Help from Dame Pat McGrath

When David Fincher cast Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander in 2011’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, she was a sweet-faced 24-year-old whose previous film credits included The Social Network and Youth in Revolt. To become Stieg Larsson’s androgynous computer-hacking Swedish loner, she needed to undergo an impressive physical transformation that helped earn her an Oscar nomination—in other words, she needed Pat McGrath. For her first major film project, fashion’s most decorated makeup artist brought the same dedication to character and color research that she would to a Versace or Prada fitting: after having Mara’s brows bleached, McGrath reportedly came up with 200 different smoky eyes, mixing black and brown eye colors with a tiny drop of red to effectively convey Lisbeth’s steely strength and her vulnerability. This kind of nuance and attention to detail is classic McGrath, and if you noticed it in Zoe Kravitz’s evolution from Selina Kyle to Catwoman in Matt Reeve’s long-awaited Robert Pattinson-fronted The Batman, your eyes did not deceive you.

“I was approached in the Spring of 2019 and I was on set by that winter,” McGrath says of the project, which paired her with Kravitz, a longtime friend. While the iconic Gotham character’s feline origin story might suggest an immediate focus on all manner of eyeliner flicks and smoldering shadows, McGrath didn’t start with Kravitz’s lids. “I started designing from the skin,” she reveals, noting that Kravitz was insistent on keeping her complexion as realistic as possible, which McGrath achieved using a mix of skincare essentials and her patented foundation technique, which leans heavily on her Pat McGrath Labs Skin Fetish Highlight and Balm Duo to illuminate the high points of the face and body, which draw light and create depth on camera. “The balm side of the dual-ended stick delivers a fresh, post spa-like finish to the skin which looks flawless even in HD,” says McGrath, adding that she worked closely with Reeves’s technical crew on the film’s London set to coordinate her application with daytime and nighttime takes as well all varieties of artificial light.