Actress Gugu Mbatha-Raw dazzles with sheer variety of jobs
NEW YORK >> Sometimes it seems like Gugu MbathaRaw is playing some crazy version of showbiz Bingo.
This is a woman who has assembled an astonishing variety of roles in her 36 years. Big-budget Hollywood blockbuster? Sure, “A Wrinkle in Time.” What about an 18th-century English drama? Of course, “Belle.” Any romantic comedies? Check out “Larry Crowne.”
She’s been on Broadway, in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” no less. And a classic Disney musical with “Beauty and the Beast.” Sci-fi? Of course, look at “Cloverfield Paradox.” Voicing a puppet? Check out “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.”
“I always like the idea of being a chameleon,” Mbatha-Raw says. “I always like to feel like I’m stretching myself and doing something opposite to what I did before. Because that keeps me interested and hopefully keeps other people interested.”
The actress has a clutch of projects coming out this fall and they’re typically diverse: the film noir feature “Motherless Brooklyn,” the flagship Apple TV Plus streaming drama “The Morning Show” and the searing indie film “Farming.”
Mbatha-Raw plays a love interest opposite Edward Norton in the actor-director’s adaption of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel “Motherless Brooklyn” about a private eye with Tourette’s syndrome.
Norton went back in time to plunk the story in 1959 and created MbathaRaw’s character, a community activist from Harlem who forges an unexpected bond with the detective.
“They’re both overlooked in different ways,” she says. “I think they see something in each other where no one else sort of sees them, which I thought was really beautiful.”
Mbatha-Raw is an actress who does her research. For “A Wrinkle in Time,” she visited NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so naturally she went to great lengths to get the tone right — walking around Harlem, listening to Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
“When you’re filming in New York, the history is all around you,” she says.
“And it’s such a treat because it really grounds you in a sense of place and time,” she said.
Mbatha-Raw goes from the ‘50s to the present day for “The Morning Show,” a series about the cutthroat off-camera world of a morning TV show that stars Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell.