ZAWE ASHTON

“BETRAYAL,” “VELVET BUZZSAW”

Actor, playwright and author Ashton is coming off a year that includes her Broadway debut, the publication of her memoir and a starring role in a Sundance hit. Considering she was planning on quitting acting at the end of 2017, it’s all the more impressive.

She had just penned her book, “Character Breakdown,” and notes, “in the writing of it, I realized just how long I’ve been doing this job and how costly what we do can be sometimes.” She quickly adds, “We’re not heart surgeons or scaling oceans or anything, but when you start acting as a child and you become an adult, you realize there really is some catch up work to do in terms of your psyche.”

But a message came through in early 2018 asking her to screen test with Jake Gyllenhaal for Dan Gilroy’s “Velvet Buzzsaw”; the experience on the Netflix film changed her. “This was exactly what I’d been looking for,” she says. “I felt like an artist again.”

Ashton followed that with a starring role in the revival of Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” opposite Marvel

stars Charlie Cox and Tom Hiddleston in London; the play then transferred to Broadway for a successful limited run in the fall. “It was a huge bucket-list moment,” Ashton raves. As if that weren’t enough, a play Ashton wrote, “For All the Women Who Thought They Were Mad,” made its debut both in London and New York.

With “Character Breakdown” coming out in paperback in February, Ashton is also at work writing a pilot and a feature. She also “aiming to direct something feature length.”

“We’ve always had these voices and these stories as women and as women of color,” she adds. “It just happens that there’s a landscape now where people are realizing not only is there an appetite for these stories, but they’re lucrative. It’s a very exciting time.” —Jenelle Riley

REPRESENTATION: Agency: CAA; The Artists Partnership (Literary) INFLUENCES: Pedro Almodóvar, Noah Baumbach, Marion Cotillard, Viola Davis, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Terrence Malick, Gaspar Noé, family