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Her role as a robot prostitute in the much-anticipated sci-fi series Westworld is already stirring up controversy. But actress and activist THANDIE NEWTON believes it’s her most empowering yet. She puts her case to Jane Mulkerrins
Actress and activist Thandie Newton on wyh her laetst, controversial role is her mtosempowering 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 high-end 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 per cent 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 much-anticipated 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 animal-rights 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. ‘I work hard to try to end violence against women,’ she says. ‘Human trafficking, sexual trafficking… it is an epidemic, and I do a great deal of campaigning against it in my spare time.’ (Thandie is on the board of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which founded the One Billion Rising mass-action campaign; one billion being the number of women worldwide who will be raped or beaten in their lifetime.) But then, she says, she would find herself going to do her ‘real job – the one for which I get paid’ and betraying those ideals. ‘The amount of times I have found myself saying to a director: “This woman isn’t a bitch, she is a misunderstood person.”’ She rolls her eyes. ‘I was constantly playing these female characters who were written in one dimension. And then, on Westworld, every day I was a human rights activist, I was a social activist, I was empowering women just through the words I was saying.’
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 UK 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.
‘They have created a world that deals with precisely the issues that I’ve struggled with all my adult life – exploitation, ignorance and a culture of complicity and disconnection,’ says Thandie, who plays Maeve Millay, a quick-witted, sharp-tongued robot madam who falls foul of the park’s powers-that-be when she begins to go rogue and fails to fully satisfy some customers. ‘It was deeply empowering for reasons that will hopefully become apparent for an audience watching it,’ she says.
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 this is robots, who can get reprogrammed, patched up and turned off after traumatic experiences; real people can’t.’
She spends a great deal of the ten 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.’
The ever-present undercurrent of sexism and exploitation in the industry is something Thandie refuses to keep quiet about. She tells me of an incident, not so many years ago, in which a director told her to take her shirt off for a scene. She felt it was unnecessary, and said so. She puts on a gruff man’s accent: ‘He said, “Come on kid, let’s get real: Thandie Newton, top off – ratings.”’
She also recently spoke out about the sexual abuse she suffered in the audition process – when she was just 18, a director had a cameraman film up her skirt and made Thandie touch her breasts and ‘think about the guy making love to me in the scene’. It was not until years later, at the Cannes Film Festival, that she discovered that the director had been showing the tape to friends after poker games at his house.
While such abuses undoubtedly continue, Thandie believes the landscape is changing, and that recent high-profile cases have helped foster a culture more receptive to reporting it. ‘The bravery of women in, for example, the Bill Cosby and Jimmy Savile cases has marked a sea change,’ she says. ‘It has given others courage to come forward and say “enough”. I do feel a catharsis in what’s happening. A degree of justice is at least being fought for.’
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. ‘And I try to do the same for
When I read the first Westworld script I was horrified, but the point of it is to shock