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The Art of Being Thandie Newton
By : Bret Love
“This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me—Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett—and it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” – Halle Berry
Halle Berry may not have mentioned Thandie Newton specifically in her famously emotional 2002 Oscar acceptance speech, but perhaps no actress in the world has benefited more from the doors opened in the years since the Monster’s Ball star’s historic Best Actress win.
Best known at the time for her role as Tom Cruise’s love interest in Mission: Impossible II, Newton went on to star opposite Mark Wahlberg in The Truth About Charlie, Terrence Howard in the Oscar-winning Crash (for which she won a BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actress), Will Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness and Gerard Butler in Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla. Now, the 37-year-old actress, born Thandiwe Ajdewa Newton, finds herself in the luxurious position of being able to pick and choose projects working with Hollywood’s best and brightest talent.
Sitting down for an interview, her petite frame and prominent cheekbones looking stunning as ever, Newton acknowledges that even she was once bitter about the lack of roles for black actors, but that things have improved greatly with time.
“Sometimes I even have to remind my husband [writer/director Oliver Parker] that certain roles could be multiracial, and that films should reflect London the way we see it, which is more multicultural than any other city I’ve been in. But to feel that the glass is half full rather than half empty, and to celebrate the black actors that are working, is key. It has evolved in a positive way so different from 10 years ago, when I was the only black actress from England working in American movies.
“In America there’s black cinema now,” she continues, “and we don’t have that in England because the film industry is much smaller. But instead of complaining about it, recognize the positives and use that to keep going forward, bring in your friends and encourage people to look outside their small circle. Moaning about it just doesn’t do anything.”
Things haven’t always been so positive for the actress, who was born in Zambia to a Zimbabwean nurse, Nyasha, and a white English lab technician-turned-artist, Nick. Thandie and her younger brother Jamie (now a TV producer) were the only black children in the area of Cornwall, where they grew up. While she doesn’t recall any outright racism, she does admit to being the subject of cruel taunts about her appearance (which may explain her bout with bulimia in her early 20s). Although she got her first big film role, Flirting, when she was just 19, Newton has always maintained an outsider’s perspective on Hollywood.
“I started out really young and realized early on that my happiness did not lie with the business,” she recalls matter-of-factly. “I had difficult times I had to deal with, which actually made me very skeptical about the film industry. As a result of that, I looked away from it for my happiness and ended up meeting my husband. So in a weird way it’s been a really good thing, because it means I use the film industry as a pleasure for work and it’s not a pursuit to make me feel happy in my life.”
Newton credits her experience working with legendary director James Ivory on 1995’s Jefferson in Paris with cementing her love of the craft of acting, but also acknowledges that the commercial failure of films such as 1998’s Beloved inexorably changed the way she approached her career.
“I stopped thinking I had any acuity at predicting what was going to be a success or not,” she admits. “[Before that] I often picked roles thinking, this is going to further my career. When that didn’t happen with Beloved, I was so heartbroken I realized that I had to make movies for the material and enjoy the experience of making the movie, not delay the gratification.”
If anything, Newton claims to have only gotten more selective about her roles in the years since she and Parker welcomed daughters Ripley (age 9) and Nico (who turns 5 in December) into the world. But even as she strives to maintain a healthy balance between motherhood and her career, she insists that she gives the decision-making process far less thought than she used to.
“It’s just a gut reaction to something,” she says when asked how she chooses roles. “It’s funny, because I’ll read [mediocre] scripts and start to think, ‘Do I not want to do this anymore?’ But then the next day I’ll read something that I love, and I can’t wait to do it. There’s no formula to how I go with it. Sometimes it can be because I think the director is really inspiring. I remember when I did a movie with Bernardo Bertolucci, there wasn’t even a script, but I just loved the way he talked about what was going to be there.”
One gets the sense that director Roland Emmerich (10,000 BC, The Day After Tomorrow) probably wasn’t the primary draw of Newton’s current project, 2012, in which she co-stars opposite John Cusack, Woody Harrelson and Chiwetel Ejiofor. A disaster epic rooted in the ancient Mayan prediction that the world will end three years from now, the film is hardly the sort of highbrow fare typically released during Oscar season. But its canny counter-programming could prove Newton’s biggest blockbuster in years.
Regardless, the comely Brit seems to take it all in stride. With a loving marriage, two beautiful children and a career most actresses can only dream of, Newton seems to be savoring every moment with a newfound sense of peace.
“I love playing these characters, but at the end of the day it’s easy to leave them behind. I can’t explain it,” she admits with a warm smile, “but going through adolescence you’re always afraid to be yourself for fear of being mocked, criticized or rejected. But these days, I just love being me.”
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