Ruth Negga In Full Bloom
She may have shot to stardom last year with an Oscar-nominated performance in Loving, but don't mistake the actress for an ingenue.
By Thomas Beller
Jun 26, 2017
It is Mother’s Day in New Orleans when I meet Ruth Negga for lunch at a tidy place uptown called Kenton’s. A hot, humid day, early afternoon. She has been in town for a month shooting the second season of AMC’s show Preacher, living in a large, crumbling castle that sits incongruously near Audubon Park.
In the cool air of the restaurant I give my name to the maître d’ and step aside to survey the room, which is filled with nicely dressed families in pink and seersucker blue and no one who looks like Ruth Negga. Then I turn around and see her directly behind me, slouching against the wall and removing her shades to peer into the room as I did a moment ago. She wears dark jeans, black patent leather loafers, and a thin dark gray crew neck sweater; it’s all rather somber except for the vibrantly colorful turban wrapped around her head.
She has walked over from the castle and is perhaps just starting to recover from the heat, but my first impression is of a radiantly bored adolescent, or maybe Buster Keaton faced with an unpleasant chore. For this reason I greet her laughing. She perks up right away, the first of many rippling transformations of her expressive face I will see today.
It has been a busy year for Negga. In February she attended the Academy Awards, a best actress nominee for her role in the civil rights drama Loving. Even though she was up against a formidable roster (Emma Stone, Natalie Portman), there was reasonable hope of victory. “The stabbing simplicity of Negga’s acting is breathtaking,” Rolling Stone film critic Peter Travers wrote of her portrayal of Mildred Loving, one half of a mixed-race couple whose marriage was the center of a landmark Supreme Court ruling in the 1960s.
The Oscar went to Stone for La La Land, but the evening saw the relatively unknown Negga, dressed in custom Valentino, catapulted into film and fashion world stardom—a status that seems to have only been magnified by recent red carpet appearances, especially at this year’s Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala.
Negga was born in Ethiopia’s capital city, Addis Ababa, in 1982 to a white Irish mother and a black Ethiopian father. In the mid-’80s, during a period of growing political instability, there was “a window during which the educated people began to leave,” she says. “But not my father.”
Instead Ruth and her mother moved to Ireland, and her father, a surgeon, stayed behind. By the time he tried to leave, “the window had closed.” He died when she was seven. “Murdered in a car crash,” she says. “I mean killed in an accident.” They were notified by letter. “It’s not a taboo subject,” she says. “My mom talks about my dad a lot. It’s awful to not know someone who you look like. It’s tragic, but that’s life, isn’t it?”
Her mother was one of nine children, and Negga grew up in her hometown of Limerick. “In Ireland there weren’t very many black people. I was sort of exotic.” Her aunts and uncles produced many cousins, four of them about her age, all living on Dooradoyle Road in Limerick. Four boys and Ruth, roaming the fields. When she went to the Oscars she took her mother and one of those boys, now full-grown. Her mother sat upstairs, and her cousin sat beside her, beaming, because of a childhood promise.
Negga orders a French 75 and poached shrimp salad. I get a Virgin Mary and the same. She’s wearing a large ring on the middle finger of her left hand. A giant, dark red oval ruby, shaved flat as a college graduate’s hat and surrounded by tiny diamonds. I notice the way it floats around the frame of her face when she gestures as she talks, medieval in color, atmosphere, heft. Now and then the tiny diamonds catch the light.
The New York Times called Preacher, in which she co-stars with Dominic Cooper, her boyfriend of six years, “a metaphysical action caper, stylized and splattery, that doesn’t have great depth but makes up for it with volume.” Negga’s character, Tulip, is a whirling dervish of mischievous violence and action who couldn’t be further from the ripples-across-a-lake quality of her performance in Loving.
“There’s no way you would cast her as Tulip after seeing her in Loving,” says Sam Catlin, Preacher’s showrunner. “It’s a testament to her ability, and her facility for empathizing with all these types of women.” Based on a comic of the same name and produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Preacher ranges from the supernatural—there is a vampire, and also a character based on God—to the hard realism of Breaking Bad, on which Catlin worked.
In what almost sounds like a Shakespearean misidentification plot, Catlin and his team didn’t know that Negga and Cooper were a couple when casting their show. “Dominic’s name was floated to us very early on, but he wouldn’t come in to audition. In our arrogance, we thought, ‘Well, we don’t need him!’”
Meanwhile, Negga auditioned but didn’t make a huge impression. Then she sent them a scene shot on an iPhone, and it was full of “danger and volatility and sweetness and all those Tulip things,” Catlin says. “We were like, ‘Wow!’ She just leaped off the screen as Tulip. We didn’t know that off-camera she was reading with Dominic. We didn’t know anything.”
Negga was cast in Loving and Preacher at around the same time, and her last two years have been spent hopscotching between obligations. “I think I should probably take a break,” she says when I ask what she’s doing next. “Maybe visit my house in London. Turn my refrigerator back on.”
It’s clear—especially after her Oscar and Met gala appearances—that Negga is now a potent voice and face in the world of film. But she is also 35 years old. Not a child. Not an ingenue. Her virtues are not tied entirely or even primarily to youth. Her maturity is apparent as we tack back and forth between the sacred and profane while hunting for shrimp in our salads.
“Oscars versus Met gala,” I offer, “compare and contrast.” She deflects the question by commending the brilliance of her stylist, Karla Welch, and saying “how lucky I am to have such a great team.”
“But in the end it’s two dresses, and you make the choice,” I say.
“Yes, but I only have to choose from two.”
“I wasn’t fond of school,” Negga says of her childhood in Ireland. “But I wasn’t disruptive. I knew that I could use it to get somewhere. To get out so I would never have to go back.” As she approached college age, she applied to Trinity College in Dublin. “I got into the academic course at Trinity, and I was going to do it,” she says. Then a relative mentioned that she could apply for a scholarship to study acting at Trinity’s Samuel Beckett Theatre, and she did that instead. “I loved being at Trinity, but it was hard work. Nine to six every day. And you’re on a university campus, and all your friends have half an hour of lectures a week, which they barely attend.”
Having a cousin who wanted to be an actor sitting beside her at the Oscars suggests a longtime dream. “I didn’t act as a child,” she claims. “I just knew I wanted to do it.”
“You never performed in the school play?” I ask. “No, I just watched movies. I don’t know how to explain it.” Her favorite TV show in her youth was My So-Called Life.
A new song comes on, and she looks up as though Van Morrison himself might be standing by the bar. “Brown Eyed Girl!” It’s the delight of someone listening to a voice from home. “I heard that he hates hearing the song,” she says after a moment, “because he doesn’t own the rights to it and doesn’t make any money on it when it’s played.”
“Can you imagine having to play a song night after night for years while being annoyed you don’t own the rights?” I ask. She shoots me a look. “He doesn’t strike me as someone who has to do anything.”
When I first saw Negga, before we sat down, I thought she looked like a compressed Zadie Smith, an association influenced by the fact that I had earlier watched a video of Negga reading from Smith’s latest novel, Swing Time. I asked Smith for her thoughts about Negga, and she wrote me, “She’s an amazing-looking thing, isn’t she? I watched her in Loving without sound through the space between two plane seats a few days ago and was struck by the mobility of her face.”
After the “Brown Eyed Girl” moment our drinks arrive, and Negga’s eyes widen again, this time at the garden sprouting from my Virgin Mary. “Oh my god, it’s a meal! A meal! And…there’s bacon in it? How extraordinary.”
I thought again of silent movie stars like Keaton and Theda Bara, and also of Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, and of another line in Smith’s note to me. “I couldn’t hear anything, but I understood everything that was happening.”
Have you ever heard of Blue Cyprus, the bookshop on Oak Street?” Negga asks as I walk her home after lunch. “I always go in there and get books about New Orleans. I found A Confederacy of Dunces. Loved it. Ernest Gaines, Bloodline. And then Kate Chopin, The Awakening. It’s about a proper woman, married with children, but dealing with huge, oceanic emotions in a society that is all about social etiquette. It was published in 1899, and it was received so badly it broke her heart. Extraordinary. Can you imagine?”
We stop at a Circle K so she can buy a pack of cigarettes, and I bring up her ring again and by extension her frocks and jewels, the wearing of which has become almost a second career.
“Karla does all that for me,” she says of her stylist as we traipse down Magazine Street. “She generated all these amazing relationships with people she admires. And I’ve been introduced to a lot of…” She sighs inscrutably before uttering the next word: “designers.” Irene Neuwirth made the ring, headpiece, and earrings Negga wore to the Oscars. “They’re ethically sourced. I never liked the idea that someone would lose a limb just to make you look pretty.”
Neuwirth later tells me, “I very rarely want to gift things, but I made that ring specifically for Ruth. To me that ring is a mix of something that is really strong, and old, and feminine, and not overdesigned, which is all that Ruth embodies.” I tell Neuwirth about the walk I took with Negga, and watching the ring and Negga’s hands in the daylight and then in the store as she stuffed dollar bills into her purse. “I love that she’s rocking that ring at Circle K,” Neuwirth says.
Why do people in the fashion world get so excited about Negga on the red carpet? I ask Neuwirth. “People play it safe,” she says. “It can go wrong very easily. As soon as she walked down the carpet [at the Oscars] my phone blew up with e-mails. People were going crazy. She looked powerful and strong. She took a look that wouldn’t be comfortable for a lot of people and just owned it.”
“There it is,” Negga says when we reach Henry Clay Street. She’s referring to a little box with a peaked roof, a mini-library to which she makes regular visits. We open the glass door and peer in. “I’m going to put all my books in here when I leave,” she murmurs as we browse the little shelf. Then: “Oooh, my god!” She reaches in and extracts a VHS tape. “Mommie Dearest! This is incredible!”
There is celebratory photographing of this artifact—clearly someone’s idea of an appropriate gesture for Mother’s Day. She reads the text on the back. “Outrageously controversial,” she intones. She says she still has many VHS tapes, with “lots of stickers on them” because she recorded over them again and again. I think of all her cousins on Dooradoyle Road and “Brown Eyed Girl,” and I start going on about Bette Davis, who has nothing to do with Mommie Dearest but a lot to do with Joan Crawford.
“She’s a favorite,” Negga says, “a hero.”
“Bette Davis is a hero?”
“I think All About Eve is battling with Withnail & I as my favorite movie.”
We walk for a while talking about Withnail & I and how it wasn’t a hit when it came out. The song “Bette Davis Eyes” starts playing annoyingly in my head. Then we arrive at her castle, and she introduces me to her mother, who is standing next to a giant urn in the garden. We wave at each other, and I think of a remark Negga made earlier about dealing with death: “You don’t have any concept when you’re a kid. This earthquake has happened, and you don’t know how to process it, and a lot of people around you don’t know how to process it.”
Now, she says, regarding Withnail and Bette Davis, "I think good films make you feel like things are going to be okay."
Photographs by Victor Demarchelier
Styled by Nicoletta Santoro
This story originally appeared in the August 2017 issue of Town & Country.
