Celebrities
The British actress currently starring in HBO’s Westworld is pulling no punches
Thandie Newton: The British actress currently starring in HBO’s Westworld is pulling no punches, telling about the ugly and abusive side of Hollywood.
We took Than die Newtonfor granted for too long. The British actress was one of the first homegrown Nineties stars to take that big leap into the American unknown, quickly finding work stateside alongside A-listers like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey and Will Smith. But we knew little about her, or how much she had to say.
Only in recent years have we’ve learnt that much of Newton’s slight blankness was a result of industry pressure, a wall of publicists and advisers dictating how the actress should talk, how she should behave, and controlling the kind of work she put out in the world.
But by sharing her own personal history and providing horrifying insight into the ugly underbelly of Hollywood, Newton has emerged as one of the most outspoken and important voices in entertainment.
It’s only been in recent years that Newton has been vocal about the secret torment that plagued much of her early life, instigated by a relationship she had for four years from the age of 16 with the 39-year-old director John Duigan, who went on to cast her in her film debut, the Australian comedy Flirting. Only after years of therapy did Newton realise her struggles with mental health were a result of the relationship.
“In retrospect, it was the psychic knot that was pulled so tight and that had a number of different other knots tied around it,” she said on the Off Camera podcast last year. “Because I was also an ethnic minority and that had silenced me in some ways too, and I was very, very shy, [and had] very low self-esteem. I’d been in a boarding school for a number of years so I was also unused to speaking to my family and my parents.
“From the age of 20, (I) just sat in a therapist’s chair realising that my shame and my self-harming and the disorders that I was experiencing were to do with being sexually abused, and also then compounding it by allowing it to continue to happen.”
She revealed in the same interview that she had referenced the relationship in interviews at the very beginning of her career, but had been warned by publicists to stop talking about it. “It’s not a good thing to talk about, that’s all that journalists are going to talk about,” she recalled people telling her. “But I was like, I need somebody to hear me!”
The industry warnings seemed to stick, until an epiphany occurred in 2016. “I almost got to the point where I kind of wanted to retire and do something else,” she revealed last year. “But it’s hard to find something else like this that’s going to give you money for the rent and for the school fees. It’s tough. It’s an amazing job. (But) in terms of satisfying a good contribution to the world, it’s difficult. Until Westworld.”
New turn in career
The HBO smash signalled a new turn in Newton’s career. Brothel madam Maeve Millay’s journey to self-actualisation, demanding the truth about her origins in an android amusement park, seems to have mirrored Newton’s own recent trajectory. “Westworld, every day, I’m contributing not only to making the world better but also healing bits of me that have been affected as a woman, and as a woman of colour,” she has said.
In the past year, Newton has appeared to publicly exorcise her personal demons, while abandoning a Hollywood rule book that expects its talent, particularly if they’re female and non-white, to embrace a relentless publicist-approved self-censorship. She now regularly calls out the industry for its hypocrisy.
“Institutions where there are young people around, hosting young people, are hotbeds for sexual exploitation,” she told Off Camera. “I think that in the institution that is show-business, there is more infrastructure to protect perpetrators of crimes than there is to protect young people who are coming into the business.”
Casting couch
Last year, she recounted a story to W Magazine about an audition in which she was encouraged by a director to grope herself while imagining sex with another character. “I thought, ‘Ok, this is a little weird,’ but there was a female casting director in the room and I’d done weird stuff before so I did it.”
Years later she discovered a tape of the audition, with the camera shooting up her skirt, had done the round sin Hollywood, the director in question showing it to his friends after poker games. It was only brought to her attention when Newton’s husband, the screenwriter Ol Parker (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel), cornered a producer after he drunkenly accosted her saying, “Oh, Thandie, I’ve seen you recently!”
“So many people in our business, they don’t want to be the ones to say something that’s a bum out because then they become associated with a bum out and nobody wants to read about so-and-so because they’re always blabbering on about a bum out,” she said. “But one person will read this and it will stop them getting sexually abused by a director. That’s the person I’m interested in.”
Cruelty in the industry
A slightly less criminal but still unseemly incident occurred on the set of 2004’s Crash, for which she received a Bafta Award. Her characterexperiences a sexual assault at the hands of a racist cop during one of the film’s scenes, and Newton has said that director Paul Haggis did not adequately convey to her the extent of the scene until she was on set.
“When I read the script, that scene was really sparsely written,” she told Giant Magazine in 2007 (via Contact Music). “I’m sure this is because otherwise they wouldn’t have gotten funding.” Haggis reportedly informed Newton that they were going to take the scene “a lot further”, and recommended she wear bicycle shorts while filming.
“I was very emotional and jetlagged and tired, so I just burst into tears and ran off. The normal me would have argued, but I did it eventually, and I think my state of mind helped the scene ,” she said at the time.
But, last year, she told The Guardian that she was sure speaking about her sexual abuse, and confronting exploitation and cruelty in the industry, would cost her work.
“Sometimes it p----- people off and they disinvite me from their lives,” she said. “I do understand why actors’ reputations start to follow them round as being difficult. I kind of gave up on being given gifts from the industry. I just thought I was going to have to be a rebel, fighting for ever.”
A testament to a Hollywood
Only this week Newton has expressed the difficulties of working in British film and television as a black actress, and how strikingly unique it was to be offered the lead role in BBC One’s Line of Duty, where she plays a detective chief inspector under investigation for corruption. In talking about industry inequalities to The Sunday Times, she exposed the failings of many of UK TV’s biggest shows, and the dire consequences for non-white talent they leave in their wake.
“I love being (in the UK), but I can’t work,” she said. “Because I can’t do Downton Abbey, can’t be in Victoria, can’t be in Call the Midwife — well, I could, but I don’t want to play someone who’s being racially abused. I’m not interested in that, don’t want to do it ...
“There just seems to be a desire for stuff about the royal family, stuff from the past, which is understandable, but it just makes it slim pickings for people of colour. I’m talented at what I do, but I’ve had to struggle against racism and sexism. But I’m glad of it, in a way, that I survived and overcame.”
That Newton’s career has never been more busy is a testament to a Hollywood that is hopefully altering its treatment of outspoken talent. We’ve had this conversation before, of course, more often than not winding up chronically disappointed. But with upcoming roles in Star Wars’ Han Solo spin-off, Xavier Dolan’s English-language debut and a top-secret thriller with Charlize Theron, Newton looks set to be unearthing industry ugliness for a long time to come.
I almost got to the point where I kind of wanted to retire and do something else. But it’s hard to find something else ... that’s going to give you money for the rent and for the school fees.” Thandie Newtown, actress