Play time for Ruth! She’s joining Craig on Broadway
Macbeth role to Shake things up
RUTH Negga is set to join James Bond on a rather different kind of mission... performing in a new production of Macbeth on Broadway. The Oscar nominee will make her Broadway debut as Lady Macbeth – with 007 star Daniel Craig, who has now finished his time as Bond, playing Macbeth. The Limerick actress is no stranger to Shakespeare, as she played Ophelia in Hamlet in an off-Broadway production in 2010. She then won rave reviews playing Hamlet at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 2018 – one of the first times that a woman has played the lead role in Shakespeare’s most acclaimed play.
She and the Dublin cast then moved to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn last year to reprise Hamlet for a New York stage. That helped the 39-yearold to land her the latest role in Macbeth.
This is Daniel’s return to Broadway, following his stint in 2013 play Betrayal. The 53-year-old also has some Shakespeare experience under his belt, previously featuring in an offBroadway production of Othello in 2016.
A statement from a press release for the new play said: ‘This thrilling new production will capture the passion and ferocity of Shakespeare’s most haunting text like never before.’ The ‘Scottish play’ will be directed by Tony Award-winning Sam Gold with James Bond producer Barbara Broccoli also working on it.
‘Daniel is not only a great film actor but a magnificent theatre actor as well,’ Ms Broccoli said.
Gold said theatre was emerging after Covid and that he would be working with ‘two masterful actors on one of dramatic literature’s most challenging and epic dramas’.
Ms Negga was nominated for an Oscar for the 2016 biopic Loving, in which she played a black woman who was jailed for marrying a white man in 1950s Virginia.
Emma Stone took the award for La La Land, but Negga received widespread acclaim for her performance.
She is currently promoting Passing, a film about two women in Harlem in the 1930s.
‘Passion and ferocity’