Nymphaea
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The Edit by Net-A-Porter
January 26, 2017
Truth be Told
Model Thandie Newton
Photographer Hasse Nielsen
Styling Aurelia Donaldson
net-a-porter
January 26, 2017
Truth be Told
Model Thandie Newton
Photographer Hasse Nielsen
Styling Aurelia Donaldson
Actress Thandie Newton never shies away from the truth, even when it causes her pain, costs her work or loses her friends. She talks to Eva Wiseman about, well, everything.
At 44 with three children, Thandie Newton still has the vibrating energy of a teenager. After a little while, over coffee, I come to realize it’s a kind of fury. Despite having studied anthropology at Cambridge University, Newton talks like someone who has only recently had an awakening about humanity and its various horrors. She is deeply political, but imparts her knowledge with a welcome spoonful of mischief, even when discussing the sexual abuse she suffered in her teens.
She “sleepwalked” through her early career, she says, not speaking up, accepting that her full name, Thandiwe, would be Westernized for the credits; consenting that she was a difficult hire because of her ‘brownness’. It was only two years ago, as she started filming the now stellar Hbo series Westworld, playing a sentient android who is naked for much of the show, that she says she felt in control at work for the first time in her life.
Brought up in Cornwall to a British father and a Zimbabwean mother, Newton was always aware that she didn’t “fit”. “I was the kid who was complicated to be friends with, because I was brown,” she says. “But I’m quite glad of that, now.” Glad? “I realized how useful being alone is for figuring out your relationship to life. For me especially. I’m challenged all the time: being a woman who doesn’t want to communicate sexually as a way of making people comfortable; being a woman in a tough industry; being a spokesperson for voiceless women; being African, but also being English. There are so many things I need to speak for.” That’s quite a weight of responsibility to bear, isn’t it? “It’s who I am,” she shrugs, “so I may as well have a little root around. And I’m a mother; I want to figure this stuff out for my children, too.”
Recently, Newton sat down with her daughters, Ripley, 16, and Nico, 12 (with director husband Ol Parker; they also have a son, Booker, two), and revealed how she was taken advantage of, aged 16, by a much older director. “I told them that the first time I ever had any sexual encounter, it was abuse. Eventually, my 12-year-old stopped me and said, ‘Mum, don’t worry. I am way cooler than you were at my age.’” She cackles. “Do you ever contribute to [the blog] Everyday Sexism?” she asks, suddenly. “I want to, but I’d have to do it endlessly; I’d have to do it about so many people I work with.”
A few years before the abuse conversation, Newton talked to Ripley about sex. The actress was pregnant with Nico at the time, and wanted to read Ripley an article she had written for her friend Oprah Winfrey’s magazine about homebirth, followed by an explanation of how the baby got there. “I said, ‘Daddy has a beautiful penis, which enters Mama, and these two precious parts of us join together…’ A few days later, Ripley came home from school, saying, ‘Mummy, I had to tell Don he was wrong today. Don said sex is when a man makes his willy go really hard and then beats the woman with it.’” Newton’s face quickly moves between despair, anger, then relief. “Lucky I got to her first,” she laughs.
In fact, Newton doesn’t need to use Everyday Sexism; she has repeatedly talked about her experiences to the press; about the audition where they filmed up her skirt, a drunk producer telling her years later that they would watch the footage at parties. “I talk about misogyny endlessly, because it’s part of everything,” she says. “I have learned that in organizations where young people are unsupervised, there is more infrastructure to protect perpetrators of abuse than there is to protect the children. And I have been through so many of those institutions, whether schools or film sets.” She talks with a brisk matter-of-factness that is quite chilling. “Yes, it is terrifying, but it’s more terrifying when we don’t speak about it. There’s such a huge gap between what’s presented to us as the thing, and what the thing really is.” When I ask her to explain, she points to my phone.
The story this phone tells, she says, is that it facilitates love.“This phone is going to connect you with your child, and you’re going to cry tears of love through the screen, and you’re not going to think about the women and children, who I have met, who have been gang raped so that the militia who are trying to control them can extract coltan from the ground.” She pauses, enjoying my silence. “Coltan is the thing that makes your phone vibrate. We are presented with this marketing campaign of togetherness and love and freedom, and the thing is literally made of minerals that will destroy the world.”
She tells a similar story about yogurt and human-rights atrocities, and my face must fall into a sort of tangled pit, because she stops, biting her lip. “Sorry. I realize that I tend to be a bit of a bum out sometimes, because I bring stuff like this up all the time. But only because it really f****** bothers me.” I must look profoundly depressed, because she rubs my knee maternally. “I’ve been cut out of people’s lives often because I’ve said things that are unpalatable.” Is it worth it? “It hurts me like f****** hell.”
“Do you know what we need?” Newton asks abruptly. There are so many thoughts charging through her that you’re likely to find yourself speeding down a slip road into a whole other conversation without warning. It’s surprisingly invigorating. “A word, like misogyny, but specifically for women who despise other women,” she continues. Venomism, I suggest. “Femishame?” she counters, winning.
In 2012, Newton launched a website with her friend, makeup artist Kay Montano. Ostensibly a beauty site for women of color, it is about so much more than makeup, running interviews with Pakistani filmmaker and double Oscar-winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, and the brilliant Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is another way, within the ‘Trojan horse’ of a beauty site, for the actress to shine a light on the injustice she sees and the women who inspire her.
Until now, Newton explains, she’s felt she had to spell things out. To say what she thinks and lose friends, or work, along the way. But since Westworld – a sophisticated fable about morals and sin, where her character Maeve (the cyborg
madam of a Wild West brothel) discovers her life is a lie – she feels more comfortable letting the work speak for her; she’s just finished shooting Line of Duty (airing later this year), for example, a thrilling police corruption drama. The new idea, she explains, is that her acting becomes a form of activism. “I am so grateful for work opportunities that allow me to be thoughtful. Also, sharing those things as opposed to sharing yet another underwritten role, written for a woman by a man. Yet another project that doesn’t even have a whiff of passing the Bechdel test.” Her hands rise, as if in prayer. “I’m so grateful to finally be a three-dimensional character.”
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