Interview from timesonline.co.uk:
Thandie lightens up
British star Thandie Newton has negotiated personal trauma, a Cambridge degree and motherhood to become an A-list Hollywood star by stealth. And now, with a new direction in comedy, she’s looking on the bright side.
Thandie Newton can do intense (Beloved), troubled (Crash) and downright tragic (The Pursuit of Happyness) with a commitment that makes Hollywood beg for more, please. “God, yeah, I’m good at playing the emotionally strangled person,” she says. “The woman who is in the worst place in her life. That’s me!” Off camera, she’s far from emotionally strangled – she laughs easily and chats happily about anything you care to mention, with the savvy of an actress who has not only survived but thrived at the top of her industry for a long time. For while we’re used to the fuss being made about Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley, Thandie Newton has been quietly carving out an international reputation for herself with big-budget Hollywood movies and Oscar-contender roles. Remarkably, she’s well into her second decade of making movies and she’s only 34.
But Newton is drawn to exploring darker characters, pointing out that, even though her life is happy now, this wasn’t always the case. In her early twenties she emerged from a relationship with an older man feeling guilty, so she went into therapy to get herself “sorted”. Today she is “fascinated by the darker sides of people. I feel such sympathy. I can’t stand serial killer movies, seeing all these one-dimensional baddies. Life is about shades…”
Her best performances have come from examining such territory: a good example is the Oscar-winning Crash, which deftly dissected racism in Los Angeles. Newton was brilliant as a woman sexually assaulted by a white cop, who later saves her life.
“I so love that film,” she says. “I waited 18 months for the role and it was worth it.” Newton’s performance was arguably the most memorable of a stellar ensemble cast and rightly won her a Bafta for Best Supporting Actress.
She followed Crash with another tough role in The Pursuit of Happyness, playing a young mother at the end of her tether who walks out on her husband (Will Smith) and their son when he loses his job and they face economic ruin. It’s a measure of Newton’s clout and her personality – she’s certainly no pushover – that, although she wanted to work with Smith, she argued for a radical script change in the way her character was portrayed and won the day.
“The Pursuit of Happyness was miserable. I could barely get to grips with the idea of it. But I realised that if a woman wants to do that, she’s at the end. If you leave your kids, you want to die. That’s the only way I could think of it and that’s the way I played it. I hope that came across. You should have seen the script when I first got it. I thought, ‘sh*t, I’ve got to do this. I can’t let someone else portray this character as a one-dimensional b*tch.’ That would be another strike against women. To give them credit, the director and Will knew that.”
It’s hardly surprising that she decided to follow these two films by turning to some lighter fare. There was the Eddie Murphy star vehicle Norbit, which was critically mauled. Next, she stars alongside British comedy’s man of the moment, Simon Pegg, in Run, Fat Boy, Run, directed by David (Ross from Friends) Schwimmer.
“It was like, ‘Oh yeah, please, I want to play a girl who has it sorted.’ I realised that I wasn’t making films that reflected my joy and my optimism. Simon made me laugh and I needed a laugh.”
Newton is delighted with the film. “I thought it would be entertaining and Simon is hilarious. But it’s more than that; it has depth and a heart. That was David’s big thing. He kept saying, ‘Look, we can do a comedy but can we do a drama with a real story and real people that is also funny?’ It’s very funny and very poignant.”
Pegg (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) plays Dennis, a commitment-phobe who jilted his pregnant girlfriend (Newton) on their wedding day. Five years later, as she is about to marry her American boyfriend (Hank Azaria), he wakes up to the fact that he is about to lose her – and his son – for ever. “It’s about him growing up,” she says. “But for my character, when you are eight months pregnant, compassion for that kind of behaviour goes out of the window. It’s like, ‘Step up to the plate or sod off then…’”
We meet in the Electric, a private cinema on Portobello Road, near her home in West London. She’s small-boned and delicate; in the past there was speculation that she was unhealthily thin. It’s not the case, she says; she’s always been tiny – although she did once admit to struggling with bulimia in her early twenties. Born in Zambia, to a Zimbabwean district nurse, Nyasha, and a white English lab technician turned artist, Nick Newton, Thandie and her younger brother Jamie, a TV producer, grew up in Penzance, the only black children in the area.
“I don’t remember racism. Just cruelty, the usual kids’ stuff, you know ‘big ears’ or ‘big nose’,” she says. “But my mum and I have talked about this and my parents kept us safe from a lot of crap. I knew that, as a girl, none of the boys wanted to go out with me, it was too extreme.” Mostly, she has happy memories of her early childhood and is close to her parents and her brother. Now she has a family of her own – she is married to the British director Ol Parker and they have two daughters, Ripley and Nico. She delights in taking them down to Cornwall. “Ripley loves it there. It’s where I grew up and it wasn’t that I became jaded by it but, you know, you want to move on from where you grew up. Because she’s a Londoner, Ripley has a much stronger appreciation of it, and I love seeing it all through her eyes.”