The roles Newton regrets

Thandie Newton has a complicated relationship with Hollywood, said E. Alex Jung in New York magazine. The daughter of a white father and a black mother, Newton is very frank about how the film industry has treated her as a black actress. Her skin color, she says, has often been a problem during casting, with filmmakers asking, “Is she black enough?” or “Is she too black?” Several times, including in the film Beloved, Newton says, she “would put on a fake tan” to make her skin appear much darker. When she played Sally Hemings in Jefferson in Paris, the director wanted her to be very pale. “On my Instagram, I don’t put my dad up much,” she says, “and that’s because I want black people to feel they can trust me. All my career, I felt like, to black people, I’m not a legitimate black person.” Looking back, Newton says she’s embarrassed by some of her roles because they are too simplistic and “misrepresent African-Americans.” Crash, for instance, depicts her being saved from a burning car by a white man—a kind of optimistic white liberalism that “neutralized the very real rage African-American people feel,” she says. Newton says she has more to reveal about her experience with racism, her sexual abuse by a director, and Hollywood’s casting couch. “I’ve got my little black book,” she says, “which will be published on my deathbed.”

Eating 10,000 calories a day

Joe Thomas’ retirement required him to cut his calorie intake by half, said Emily Kaplan in ESPN.com. As a star offensive lineman for 11 seasons with the Cleveland Browns, Thomas had to bingeeat 10,000 calories a day to maintain his weight of 310 pounds. A typical day included a breakfast of four pieces of bacon, four sausage links, eight eggs, three pancakes, and oatmeal with peanut butter; a lunch of pasta and meatballs; and a dinner of an entire pizza plus a sleeve of Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies and a bowl of ice cream, then a protein shake before bed. “If I went two hours without eating, I literally would have cut your arm off and started eating it,” he says. “I felt if I missed a meal after two hours, I was going to lose weight, and I was going to get in trouble. We got weighed on Mondays, and if I lost 5 pounds, my coach was going to give me hell.” Today’s offensive linemen weigh 60 pounds more on average than they did in 1970, using the extra inertia as roadblocks to slow down pass rushers. After Thomas retired in 2017, he eventually learned to eat healthily and lost 50 pounds. “You’re training yourself to have an eating disorder when you’re in the NFL,” he says, “and to try to deprogram that is a real challenge.”