Newton’s Theory
She’s the British actress who conquered Hollywood on her own terms. Now she’s taking on the world’s most powerful woman. Bret love meets Thandie Newton IT IS ONE of the most surprising casting decisions, well, ever. Not many people would have pencilled in the delicately beautiful Thandie Newton to play the intense US Secretary of State Condoleezza [...]
She’s the British actress who conquered Hollywood on her own terms. Now she’s taking on the world’s most powerful woman. Bret love meets Thandie Newton
IT IS ONE of the most surprising casting decisions, well, ever. Not many people would have pencilled in the delicately beautiful Thandie Newton to play the intense US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, not least because Newton is mixed-race, British and almost 20 years younger. But Oliver Stone, director of W, the new biopic of President George W Bush did, and the result is a remarkable impersonation which will confirm her as one of Hollywood’s biggest talents.
Even Newton herself admits she was surprised to be asked. But she soon realised this film was going to be a great opportunity. With the upcoming elections, Bush’s plummeting approval rating, and Stone’s famously liberal views, the American right have been howling about a stitch-up job since the film was announced. However, Newton refuses to criticise Rice and says the time she spent studying her for the film made her understand what drives the seemingly frosty former academic.
“We were going for a very authentic, natural human portrait. It was about the dynamics of the relationships between the players of the administration. It’s not so
simple that you can say it’s a slam [against Bush] or respectful, because life isn’t that black and white. The movie is much more about the shades of grey, allowing the
audience to figure out how they feel about it.”
Newton seems to be on a roll at the moment. She has recently been on screen as the slyly manipulative accountant in the latest high-action Guy Ritchie movie
RocknRolla. Previously she has mixed roles in blockbusters like Mission: Impossible II, and low-budget comedies like Run, Fat Boy, Run, with serious fare like Crash, for which she won a Bafta. She even turned down Lucy Liu’s role in Charlie’s Angels to concentrate on her family.
But things haven’t always been so positive for the 36-year-old actress, who was born Thandiwe Ajdewa Newton to a Zimbabwean nurse, Nyasha, and a white
English laboratory technician-turned-artist, Nick. Thandie and her younger brother Jamie (now a TV producer) were the only black children in the Penzance area of Cornwall
where they grew up.
alt="Newton is at her seductive best in Guy Ritchie’s latest gangster epic, RocknRolla">
Although she doesn’t recall any outright racism she does admit to being the subject of cruel taunts about her appearance. This may have played a contributory factor to
her bout of bulimia in her early twenties, although she has remained extremely slender since.
Discrimination also goes on in the movie industry of course. Newton was once bitter about the lack of roles for black actors. Things are getting better, she says, but there is
still some way to go.
“In America there’s black cinema now and we don’t have that in England because the film industry is much smaller. But instead of complaining about it, you should recognize the positives and use that to keep going forward. Moaning about it just doesn’t do anything.”
A case in point is close to home. She tries to be proactive about this issue with her husband, the writer/director Ol Parker: “Sometimes I even have to remind my husband
that certain roles could be multi-racial, and that films should reflect London the way we see it, which is more multicultural than any other city I’ve been in.”
Newton has always maintained something of an outsider’s perspective on Hollywood, despite getting her first big film role, Flirting, when she was just 19 years old.
“I started out really young and realised early on that my happiness did not lie within the business,” she recalls matter-of-factly, and was canny enough not to sacrifice her
education for the glamour of the movies.
alt="Crash with Matt Dillon">
In fact, she studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, taking on roles during the long vacation periods. “I had difficult times I had to deal with,
which actually made me very sceptical about the film industry. As a result of that, I looked away from it for my happiness and ended up meeting my husband.”
Newton credits her experience working with legendary director James Ivory on 1995’s Jefferson In Paris with cementing her love of the craft of acting, but also
acknowledges that the commercial failure of films such as 1998’s Beloved fundamentally changed the way she approached her career. Beloved was adapted by Oprah
Winfrey from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize novel about slavery but still failed to cause box office excitement (coincidentally, Thandiwe means ‘beloved’ in Xhosa, one of
her mother’s languages).
“I stopped thinking I had any acuity at predicting what was going to be a success or not,” she admits. “[Before that] I often picked roles thinking, this is going to further
my career. When that didn’t happen with Beloved, I was so heartbroken I realized that I had to make movies for the material and enjoy the experience of making the movie, not delay the gratification.”
If anything, Newton claims to have only become more selective about her roles in the years since she and Parker had two daughters – Ripley, eight, and Nico, four. But
even as she strives to maintain a healthy balance between motherhood and her career, she insists that she gives the decision-making process far less thought than previously.
alt="Norbit with Eddie Murphy">
“It’s just a gut reaction to something – there’s no formula to how I decide,” she says about choosing roles. “It’s funny, because I’ll read [mediocre] scripts and start to
think, do I not want to do this any more? Then the next day I’ll read something that I love, and I can’t wait to do it. I remember when I did a movie with Bernardo Bertolucci,
there wasn’t even a script, but I just loved the way he talked about what was going to be there.”
With her two latest projects, it was clearly directors Guy Ritchie and Oliver Stone who were a huge part of the draw. “Guy and Oliver are completely different,” Newton
says when asked to compare these influential auteurs. “Guy steps back in many ways and isn’t precious about his material. He’s very confident and clear about what he
wants, but at the same time lets go of the reins in terms of what you as an actor do with your character. The same
is true for Oliver, but the material is very much based on truth. He’s hugely knowledgeable, so you’re constantly looking to him for his approval. Constantly!”
alt="Mission: Impossible II with Tom Cruise">
Ritchie and RocknRolla producer Joel Silver have made no secret about their desire to turn their film into a trilogy if the global box office returns merit the investment.
Newton boldly reveals that her character, Stella (whose fate is left in question after RocknRolla’s dynamically violent crescendo), would return in some capacity if there were to
be a sequel.
“The ending was always supposed to be a cliffhanger,” she says, “but Guy was talking to me about the sequel even as we were shooting RocknRolla. Maybe in the second film
I’d wind up mangled, doing my nasty double-crossing from a hospital bed, but I intend to work on Guy about it.”
alt="Thandie undertook a remarkable transformation to play Condoleezza Rice in W">
In both of these high-profile roles she plays a powerful woman pulling strings in arenas typically dominated by men. Could the two films be seen as analogous to Newton’s position in Hollywood, where actresses over the
age of 35 are frequently put out of pasture in favour of younger, prettier It Girls, but where Thandie seems to be
just hitting her stride?
“I made RocknRolla a year before I worked on Oliver Stone’s movie,” she counters, “and had completely different approaches to both. I wanted to do RocknRolla because it
had a great script, a lovely cast, I liked Guy very much, we were working in London, and I knew it would be a lot of fun. But Condoleezza was more like taking a deep breath,
then jumping in, terrified. But at the same time I was enormously satisfied.”
alt="Newton married film director Ol Parker in 1998.">
Those two words – enormously satisfied – seem like an apt description of Thandie Newton’s life at the moment. Instead of holding back her career, taking time out for her
family has given her the confidence to enjoy her work for what it is.
“I love playing these characters, but at the end of the day it’s easy to leave them behind. I can’t explain it,” she says with a warm smile, “but going through adolescence
you’re always afraid to be yourself for fear of being mocked, criticized or rejected. But these days I just love being me.”
