‘It’s my body, my choice, my terms’
Her role as a robot prostitute in sci-f i series Westworld is already stirring up controversy. But Thandie Newton believes it’s her most empowering yet
IAM fishing the plastic lining bag out of an empty ice bucket so that Thandie Newton can fill it with the tiny foil-wrapped sweets from the decanter on the table. ‘My kids love these little sherbet pips,’ she says when she spots them. ‘They’ll be over the moon if I take these home for them.’ Her three children, aged between two and 15, are in London, while Thandie and I are in a hotel suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills, where she is also threatening to swipe the array of highend toiletries from the bathroom – if I can find her another plastic bag.
The British actress has seemingly boundless, dervish-like energy, even in the middle of a long day of media obligations. When her kale salad arrives (she’s vegan), she delivers an impromptu lesson about the way we’re all getting conned by the food industry. ‘Do you know that you can’t get rid of kale? It’s so hardy, it’s basically a weed,’ she says. ‘That’s why we’ve all been sold it as this incredible superfood that’s going to save the universe – because you just can’t stop it growing.’ She waves her fork in the air. ‘It’s all b ****** t! And pomegranates are everywhere. That’s because they grow practically overnight and are sold for 500% more than it costs to cultivate them. But they take water away from villages [in developing countries].’ She fixes me with a serious stare. ‘It’s all about profit and it’s going to destroy the planet.’ Her indignation at such short-sighted capitalism is one of the reasons she’s so excited about Westworld, her muchanticipated television show. ‘It deals with this stuff,’ she explains. ‘Not kale or pomegranates – but the cheapness of human life.’
Animated and opinionated on myriad topics, the 43-year-old star of films including Flirting, Crash, W and Half Of A Yellow Sun is far from your average showbiz interviewee. First, she has a degree in anthropology from the University of Cambridge, and is, by her own admission, ‘a total anthropology nerd’. And, although she has been cast in hit films since she was 16, screen stardom doesn’t come top of her list of self-definitions. ‘Over the past few years, I’ve let my life as an actress take fourth place at least,’ she has said. ‘I now see myself as a mother and wife first, then a human-rights and animalrights activist.’
Her new role, however, not only puts her acting centre-stage again, but also supports her anthropological and activism interests more than any part she has previously played.
A lavish remake of a 1973 film written and directed by Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton (the original starred Yul Brynner and James Brolin), Westworld arrives on screens on Sky Atlantic this month, with a big-name cast including Anthony Hopkins and Evan Rachel Wood. Set in an unspecified time in the future, Westworld is a vast theme park where visitors can live out their basest fantasies, raping and killing seemingly with no consequences – like a darker, more twisted version of Las Vegas, with even fewer rules and no police. The park’s inhabitants, or ‘hosts’, are advanced robots, programmed with artificial intelligence, that behave like humans, even displaying emotion.
Playing a prostitute robot might not, at first glance, seem a particularly empowering move, and Thandie initially had doubts. ‘When I read the first script, there was so much that I was horrified by, but the point of it is to shock us into the awareness that this is what we do to each other,’ she says. ‘And these are robots, who can get reprogrammed, patched up and turned off after traumatic experiences; real people can’t.’
She spends a great deal of the 10 episodes naked. ‘Oh, I am naked almost all the time in the show, but I am calm about it because it is not titillating in the slightest,’ she says, making further headway with the kale. ‘It was my body, on my terms, doing what I chose to do with it. I have been in shows in which I have been fully clothed, but felt more exposed and exploited.’
When it comes to combining her work as an actress with activism, she has a powerful mentor. ‘Oprah Winfrey is my mum in a parallel universe,’ she says. ‘Our time on the movie Beloved was like becoming blood relatives.’ Based on Toni Morrison’s novel, the film starred Oprah as Sethe, a former slave, and Thandie as the title character, Beloved, a young woman who is the reincarnation of Sethe’s dead daughter. ‘She’s always been there for me, like a tree giving shade with its branches,’ says Thandie of their relationship.
Raised in Penzance in England by Zimbabwean mother Nyasha and white British father Nick – who met while they were working at a hospital in Zambia, before moving to London, where Thandie was born – Thandie was an aspiring dancer and, at 11, won a scholarship to a performing arts school in Hertfordshire in England. A back injury wrecked her dancing ambitions, but at 16 she won her first acting role in the Australian coming-of-age film Flirting, alongside Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts. She went on to appear in Interview With The Vampire and Jefferson In Paris – while studying for her degree – and, later, in blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible II and the Oscarwinning ensemble film Crash (also starring Matt Dillon and Sandra Bullock), for which she won a Bafta for best actress in a supporting role.
She was 22 when she met her now husband, the writer and director Ol Parker, 47 – who scripted The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel – on the set of TV drama In Your Dreams. Nothing more clearly demonstrates Thandie’s priorities than the names of their children: 15-year-old daughter Ripley is named after Sigour-
‘Oprah has been there for me, like a tree giving shade with its branches’
ney Weaver’s character in Alien: ‘feminine but empowered, kicking alien arse with a baby under her arm’. Ripley’s 11-year-old sister is called Nico, partly after the 1960s singer-songwriter and partly because ‘it is the name of many boys in Europe – it’s about not letting her feel “less than” in the gender competition’. Their brother Booker, two, is named after the African-American educationist and speaker Booker T Washington.
Five years ago, Thandie used her childhood experiences of growing up constantly questioning her identity in her TED talk Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself. ‘My skin colour wasn’t right. My hair wasn’t right. My history wasn’t right. My self became defined by otherness, which meant that, in that social world, I didn’t really exist,’ she said. ‘And I was “other” before being anything else – even before being a girl. I was a noticeable nobody.’ Dancing and acting, gave her an identity that she could control, and then a thriving career. But nonetheless, ‘[I was] a car crash, and I wound up with bulimia and on a therapist’s couch,’ she said.
She is now keen to take the ideas contained in her TED talk – that race is merely a concept projected on to us by others, a label created by colonialism in order to enforce control – to a younger audience. ‘I really want to write a workshop on race for schoolchildren,’ she says. ‘It’s a question my daughter [Nico] asks me all the time. She’s got my face and light, curly hair. My other daughter [Ripley] has got my face, too, but is darker, and she asks me: “Mummy, am I black?”’ Thandie throws down her fork in frustration. ‘These notions come out of slavery, apartheid, Nazism, and we’re still using them.’
Thandie’s passionately held politics are also what inspired her to create her blog, thandiekay.com. ‘It’s a beauty blog, because that is how you get people to look at it, but it’s about lots of things, including cultures and how we adorn ourselves,’ she says. ‘It was my response to mainstream publications that have been slow to recognise ethnic diversity, and is possibly the creation that is closest to my heart – outside my children.’
Early next year, Thandie will begin filming another all-star production, The Death And Life Of John F Donovan, the story of a movie star (played by Game Of Thrones star Kit Harington), who finds his correspondence with an 11-year-old actor exposed. The film also features Jessica Chastain, Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon, with a rumoured cameo by Adele. But before that, Thandie will be starring in the next season of the police drama Line Of Duty. ‘I’d never actually seen it before they sent me the script,’ she admits. ‘I was like, “Woah, this isn’t like television – this is just incredible.”’ The storyline and her role will, she says, be ‘hardcore’: ‘But I am just taking a deep breath, and off I go.’
The series – the plot centres on an anti-corruption unit – inevitably got Thandie thinking. ‘So much of the world’s population is involved in corruption and making millions from it, and here I am, worried about paying my parking ticket on time, and my tax, sweetly keeping the status quo. It’s the world we live in,’ she sighs. ‘And obviously I’m not hard up. It’s not as if I have to steal sweets or anything…’
And, with a grin, she heads off, swinging her bag of purloined sherbet pips, a hardcore anthropologist, activist – and actress, too.
Westworld begins on Sky Atlantic on Tuesday at 9pm
‘These notions come out of slavery, Nazism... and we’re still using them’