‘Passing’ star Negga refuses to be pinned down
Actor again upends notions of social constructs in film
Ruth Negga has given the subject of identity a lot of thought.
And not just because she stars as Clare Kendry, a fair-skinned Black woman who moves through life as a white woman, in “Passing,” Rebecca Hall’s adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel now streaming on Netflix. No, Negga’s musings on identity stem back to her childhood in Ireland and England, where she was first introduced to the concept of being othered.
“To be honest, I’ve never fit in anywhere,” she said. “I think being Black in Ireland when there wasn’t that many Black people and being Black and Irish in London at an all-white school in the early ’90s wasn’t great for me either.”
At the same time, being hard to categorize has not always been a bad thing, she says. “I think sometimes there is a pleasure I get in being different. I felt safe being the other in many ways because that’s where I could be my whole, true self.”
The Ethiopian-Irish actor frequently upends notions of social constructs such as race and identity in her work. In “Passing,” which is set in the 1920s, Clare enjoys the privileges afforded only to white women by day while sneaking off to Harlem to commune with Black folks by night (Tessa Thompson co-stars as Irene, a woman who only flirts with the possibility of passing). And in 2016’s “Loving,” Negga stars as Mildred Jeter, a woman in an interracial marriage who challenges the Supreme Court to end the anti-miscegenation laws that condemn her marriage as unlawful.
“Passing” is Negga’s biggest film role since the 2016 drama, which earned her Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for lead actress. Since then she, has had roles in big-budget films, including “Warcraft” and “Ad Astra,” and has worked in television on both MCU and DCEU fare (“Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and “Preacher”).
This interview with Negga has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: What draws you to stories about identity and the ambiguous nature of it?
A: I’ve always been interested in one’s own perception of (their) identity versus society’s perception, how and where that clashes and collides and where it meets in a friendly matter. It’s tricky because we don’t have an outside eye of ourselves; everyone has their own gaze and lens
through which that gaze is occurring. And that’s all fine. My problem is when I feel like other people’s perceptions and ideas of who I am and who they want me to be circumscribes my life and is limiting. That’s where I feel a bit itchy and want to get out of the box.
Q: What interested you in playing Clare as opposed to Irene?
A: The great thing about being an actor is you have to be super in touch with your emotions and understand how to manipulate them in a way. And how that spills into your real life is you become very aware of your own impulses, your own biases and you listen. And at that moment in time, for whatever reason, I was listening and viscerally I needed to play Clare. It was really to quiet some sort of curiosity within me. Because I’m so fascinated
with the color line and the ridiculousness of race, I wanted to explore what it was to literally (expletive) with it (and explore) what it feels like to be this woman who is actually wielding so much power, but secretly. There was a thrill to that, I must say. The danger is thrilling.
Q: How does “Passing” try to rebuke the tragic mulatto trope and why do you think Hollywood has historically ignored stories like this?
A: I don’t know why, that’s too big a question for a little ol’ me. Or maybe it’s not, maybe it’s simple: Misogynoir. Actually, yeah. Mic drop.
Because when you look at those portraits, they’re pathetic, and it robs them of their power, their agency. I do not believe that women passing were robbed of their agency. This was their way of gaining agency. …
History is so important in order for us to move forward because we cannot forget that people could be murdered for simply drinking water, sitting down on a bus. We mustn’t forget these things. … You have to resurrect shame in order to move through it. Ghosts of the past will keep on haunting us until we acknowledge and integrate their presence into the world.
Q: How have people projected their ideas of identity and race on you and how has that changed since you started acting?
A: I’ve kind of experienced that my entire life. I’ve always been othered. And sometimes my experience of that has been fine.
In Ireland, I always felt very proud of my otherness. I was made to feel my distinctiveness was something to be cherished and proud of. And I think that has a lot to do with my family. (After) my father died, I think everyone was feeling like, “Well, we want to keep his memory alive and for her to feel very proud of that connection to Ethiopia” and my color, and they felt very defensive of me. … But in London in the early ’90s, there was a lot of anti-Irish feelings still present, and I was in a school where there was hardly any Black people. And so the combination of those two things made for a kind of uncomfortable experience. I felt othered, I felt misunderstood, I felt like people were sort of distancing themselves from me. But then again, maybe I distanced myself from them because I did not want to assimilate (laughs). I think it was because I had been so instilled with this idea of pride in myself, my Irishness and my Blackness. If being accepted and belonging was assimilating, I was having none of that.
Q: You’ve been nominated for an Oscar, starred in a successful TV series and are earning more awards buzz for “Passing.” Do you have certain career goals left to achieve?
A: I’m goalless (laughs). I want, at some point, to have autonomy of the type of work I do, the people I work with. And once I’m there, I’m good.
I want to keep finding interesting people I want to work with, interesting scripts I want to work on. Scale doesn’t mean anything to me until it does, which means I don’t want to get bored. I don’t want to feel trapped.
Acting is changing the atmosphere in the room, on the stage, and that’s provocative. Acting by its nature is disruptive. And I like that because to me, it’s not just for the sake of disruption, I’m not just marching in there being anarchic, it’s often a byproduct of the work that interests me.