Westworld Thandie gives feisty robot Maeve a real voice
THANDIE NEWTON has had much more of a say in what happens to Maeve, the powerful android she plays in scorching TV drama Westworld, in season three, which kicked off last week. Maeve returned in Sunday night’s second episode — and her presence electrified the show after a season opener that left even diehard fans scratching their heads. Newton, 47, told me that Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, who created the fantasy thriller for HBO, encouraged her to input her ideas. ‘They’re really progressive and aware,’ she said, adding: ‘They’re hugely open to me questioning more, and collaborating more, which is not always the case in the industry. Actors are vassals; we’re a commodity. It’s a new feeling, as an actor, that my voice counts; it actually matters.’ Westworld has been a huge boost to Newton who, before the pandemic, had been commuting between the home she shares in North-West London with her partner, director Ol Parker, and their three children, and Los Angeles, where she films as the beautiful, fearsomely intelligent robot Maeve Millay. When we last spoke, she observed of her Westworld success: ‘What’s interesting is that no one expects a woman of colour, in her 40s, to have a little bit of a surge in her career. It’s so weird that it happened like this.’ In 1991, Newton appeared with Nicole Kidman and Naomi Watts in Australian teen film Flirting. Three decades later, the three friends have gained firepower through the small screen: Newton with Westworld, Kidman with Big Little Lies (and forthcoming The Undoing) and Watts with The Loudest Voice (about the birth of Fox News). Watts, by the way, is also keeping busy acting — and producing — films. One such project is Penguin Bloom, which she produced and appears in with Andrew Lincoln, who gave up his throne as sovereign of The Walking Dead. Newton told me they sometimes ‘see each other on the red carpet’. She added: ‘We lead such different lives, in different places. Nic’s in Nashville, Naomi’s in New York and I’m in London. It’s lovely, though, to see from afar these girls who have claimed their space in a difficult industry.’