Rogue

Season 3 FOX Africa (*125) 19:00

Thandie Newton is 43 and she’s already got an impressive 30-year career with loads of leading roles on her CV. And not just on the bigscreen, like in 2000’s action movie Mission: Impossible II with Tom Cruise. She’s on the telly as conflicted undercover detective Grace Travis on spy drama Rogue (2013-current).

Thandie’s mom Nyasha is a health1

care worker from Zimbabwe and her dad Nick Newton is a British lab technician. According to Thandie, her mom is a princess of the Shona tribe and the family lived in Zambia until political unrest forced the trio to move back to the UK when she was eight.

She married British writer/director 2

Ol Parker in 1998 and they have three children. She named her daughter Ripley (15) after the character played by Sigourney Weaver in sci-fi movie Alien (1979). Her second daughter Nico (11) was named after German-born singer Nico, member of iconic rock group The Velvet Underground. And the couple also have a son named Booker (2).

All of Thandie’s kids were born at 3

home in a birthing pool on her bathroom floor. “I associated hospital with being ill and I felt beautiful and healthy and wonderful when I was pregnant,” she says. “Home is the place I felt most relaxed and comfortable.”

She loved playing Tom’s love inte4

rest Nyah Nordoff-Hall in MI-II and says that “it was hysterical. We wanted to make it [the love scenes] naughty and fun. When the camera stopped rolling, it was hard to stop laughing”.

She also prefers complicated cha5

racters with depth. “I’m good at playing the emotionally strangled person. The woman in the worst place in her life. That’s me,” she laughs.