Ruth Negga
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Behind the Scenes of Loving, the Most Beautiful Love Story Ever Told (Vogue, November 2016)
Meet Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the brilliant stars of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s sweeping portrait of an interracial couple fıghting for their right to marry in 1950s Vırginia.
We enter the story in 1958, in rural Virginia. A woman and a man stand in an open field of grass; she is telling him she is pregnant. There is a hint of worry in her luminous dark eyes, but the man assures her that they will get married and build a home together. The opening scene of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s quietly devastating new film, feels less like a beginning and more like a happily-ever-after ending. But because this is 1950s Virginia, and the woman is black and the man is white, the story does not unfold in the way of fairy tales. For Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving—a real-life couple played in the film by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton—the seemingly straightforward act of getting married becomes a dangerous and transgressive act.
With its lush cinematography, Loving is a visual paean to the 1950s, but it is also a fierce interrogation of the hypocrisies of that era. It traces the arc of the Lovings’ struggle to live as husband and wife at a time not so long ago when it was illegal in sixteen states to marry someone of a different race. As the Lovings are forced to leave their tight-knit, working-class community and live in Washington, D.C., around them swirls language that evokes the present debate on gay marriage. “It’s God’s law,” the sheriff tells the couple after their harrowing middle-of-the-night arrest. “A robin’s a robin, a sparrow is a sparrow.” As Edgerton says, “That’s the double beauty of the film. It’s a racial period piece, but it also echoes very loudly today.”
Negga gives a radiant and haunting performance as Mildred, transforming from a country girl everyone calls Stringbean into an accidental activist—an unwitting righter of history’s wrongs. “Her quiet evolution was so touching to me,” says the actress, who was born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother. “To have that kind of hope in an atmosphere of threat and fear.”
Audiences will recognize the actress for her supporting role in the sci-fi feature Warcraft and her starring role as Tulip O’Hare on AMC’s Preacher, which has just been greenlighted for another season. But with Loving, and the early Oscar buzz around her performance, she is on the cusp of a whole other level of stardom. For her, the subject of the movie was highly personal. When she was around four, she moved with her family from Ethiopia to Ireland. County Limerick was more pastoral than suburban then, and Negga says she deeply identifies with Mildred’s sense of connection to a place. “Virginia isn’t that different from Ireland,” she says. “Land and home and community are superimportant. When I was playing her, I tried to imagine I couldn’t go home again because of whom I married. It must have drained the lifeblood from her.” She also related to Mildred’s dawning racial awareness. “When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn’t experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you’re black. A kind of lifting of the veil.”
Edgerton, who has made a career of playing tough, lonely antiheroes, finds pathos in the role of Richard, who is as guarded as he is devoted to his wife. To capture the taciturn construction worker, the 42-year-old Australian actor bleached his hair, adopted a receding hairline, and wore prosthetic teeth. “I was thinking the whole time how he must have felt as a man, that he had led the woman he loved into trouble,” he says. The real Richard was uncomfortable in the role of activist, but he was never ambivalent about the woman he’d chosen to marry. “How easy the door out of that marriage would have been,” Edgerton says. “It was a door he never thought to go through.”
Loving is Nichols’s fifth feature. He’s a Southern white man taking on race and history—in a year when these themes have embroiled the nation. “The last thing I want to be is defensive,” Nichols says on a hot August afternoon in his modest studio in Austin, Texas, not far from the home he shares with his wife, Missy, and their six-year-old, Sam. “Germany has spent a long time coming to terms with its horrors—but in America we’ve never really faced the horrors of slavery and everything that came in its wake. It’s like a wound. Sunlight has to get in there for it to heal.”
A youthful, sandy-haired 37, Nichols is preppily dressed in khakis, a navy polo, and loafers without socks. His previous films include the coming-of-age story Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey, and Midnight Special, a sci-fi thriller that also starred Edgerton. “All of my films have been written and imagined in the South,” he says with a slight Arkansas twang. “I wanted to portray the Southerners I recognized from growing up. I didn’t want to portray them in this horrifying, cartoonish way.”
His studio is stripped down—a desk, a computer, posters of John Carpenter’s Starman and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Hanging beside his desk is a gift from McConaughey—a framed photograph of a boat perched in a tree from the set of Mud, with a plaque that says, well, you wrote it.
Nichols grew up in Little Rock—his father owned a furniture store; his mother was a homemaker—and remains close to his two older brothers (their initials are tattooed on his forearm around a clover). He went to the same Little Rock high school that was notorious for race riots during the 1950s school-integration efforts. The mythology of the civil rights movement, he says, “was invoked in every school assembly.”
Still, when a producer sent him the 2011 HBO documentary The Loving Story, directed by Nancy Buirski, he had never heard of the case. It’s already lore that his wife told him, “If you don’t make this movie, I’m going to divorce you.” But Nichols’s way in was through his maternal grandparents, rural people in whom he recognized the same stoicism as he saw in the Lovings.
Nichols never went to film school. “I couldn’t afford it—and I was young and antsy and wanted to make films out of the gate.” As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he found his coterie, the same small group with whom he still collaborates. Raymond Carver and William Faulkner were as much influences on him as the movies he saw with his father at the Dome Theatre in Little Rock: Lawrence of Arabia, Jaws, Fletch. When asked about his favorite cinematic era, he says, “If I was being honest, the eighties. If I was trying to sound smart, the seventies. If I really thought about it, the sixties.” Nichols’s expansive visual storytelling feels more in sync with Spielberg than with the grungier digital aesthetic of his indie-filmmaking peers.
Loving, the director says, is his most “precise” film to date. “I wanted to get everything right. If I needed to do four more takes, I would do four more takes.” He did a huge amount of research. “Jeff created one of the best gelled-together worlds I’ve seen—like a window into time,” says Edgerton.
“Jeff saw this as the most beautiful love story in the world that’s never been told,” says Negga, who was the first person Nichols auditioned. At first he thought she was too petite. But then, he says, “she spoke in Mildred’s voice. She held her mouth like Mildred.” He didn’t even know she was Irish until he talked to her afterward. “I wasn’t looking for star power,” he says. “I was looking for great actors.” Negga and Edgerton movingly capture the ordinary tenderness between a husband and wife. When asked about their chemistry, Nichols says, “Joel and Ruth liked each other.”
Nichols was intent on verisimilitude: “I didn’t feel comfortable making things up with this story—the jail was the same jail they stayed in. The front shot of the courthouse was the same courthouse.” The couple’s younger son, Donald, and their baby were played by relatives of the real Mildred. He also brought on the Lovings’ only surviving child, Peggy, as a consultant. “Peggy was tough. She was there, watching the scene where they were passing around plates of food over dinner. She said, straight-faced, ‘Well, you got that wrong.’ Then she started laughing. She had an interesting sense of humor.”
The climactic scene in Loving could have taken place solely in the courtroom, but for one thing—the Lovings weren’t there. Nichols used their absence to his advantage, telling the story of that day from the periphery. The couple spent those hours at home, Mildred sewing and cooking, Richard laying bricks and mowing the lawn. The children are shown playing in the yard out front. Earlier, when the lawyers ask Richard if there is anything he’d like to tell the Supreme Court before their trial, he says simply, “Tell the judge I love my wife.” (It’s Negga’s favorite line in the film.) As the camera moves between their family life and the courtroom, the divide between the powerful and the powerless has rarely been laid out so starkly. Here is the Supreme Court trying to decide whether this couple and their children should exist, while far from the grand white steps of the courthouse, they are busy existing. As Edgerton says, “It is a sad happy ending because they win, but nobody can give them back those years.”
Loving v. Virginia once and for all invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in this country. “There was an inevitability to that couple,” says Negga. “They were like the poster couple for the future.”
Source
Meet Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the brilliant stars of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s sweeping portrait of an interracial couple fıghting for their right to marry in 1950s Vırginia.
We enter the story in 1958, in rural Virginia. A woman and a man stand in an open field of grass; she is telling him she is pregnant. There is a hint of worry in her luminous dark eyes, but the man assures her that they will get married and build a home together. The opening scene of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s quietly devastating new film, feels less like a beginning and more like a happily-ever-after ending. But because this is 1950s Virginia, and the woman is black and the man is white, the story does not unfold in the way of fairy tales. For Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving—a real-life couple played in the film by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton—the seemingly straightforward act of getting married becomes a dangerous and transgressive act.
With its lush cinematography, Loving is a visual paean to the 1950s, but it is also a fierce interrogation of the hypocrisies of that era. It traces the arc of the Lovings’ struggle to live as husband and wife at a time not so long ago when it was illegal in sixteen states to marry someone of a different race. As the Lovings are forced to leave their tight-knit, working-class community and live in Washington, D.C., around them swirls language that evokes the present debate on gay marriage. “It’s God’s law,” the sheriff tells the couple after their harrowing middle-of-the-night arrest. “A robin’s a robin, a sparrow is a sparrow.” As Edgerton says, “That’s the double beauty of the film. It’s a racial period piece, but it also echoes very loudly today.”
Negga gives a radiant and haunting performance as Mildred, transforming from a country girl everyone calls Stringbean into an accidental activist—an unwitting righter of history’s wrongs. “Her quiet evolution was so touching to me,” says the actress, who was born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother. “To have that kind of hope in an atmosphere of threat and fear.”
Audiences will recognize the actress for her supporting role in the sci-fi feature Warcraft and her starring role as Tulip O’Hare on AMC’s Preacher, which has just been greenlighted for another season. But with Loving, and the early Oscar buzz around her performance, she is on the cusp of a whole other level of stardom. For her, the subject of the movie was highly personal. When she was around four, she moved with her family from Ethiopia to Ireland. County Limerick was more pastoral than suburban then, and Negga says she deeply identifies with Mildred’s sense of connection to a place. “Virginia isn’t that different from Ireland,” she says. “Land and home and community are superimportant. When I was playing her, I tried to imagine I couldn’t go home again because of whom I married. It must have drained the lifeblood from her.” She also related to Mildred’s dawning racial awareness. “When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn’t experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you’re black. A kind of lifting of the veil.”
Edgerton, who has made a career of playing tough, lonely antiheroes, finds pathos in the role of Richard, who is as guarded as he is devoted to his wife. To capture the taciturn construction worker, the 42-year-old Australian actor bleached his hair, adopted a receding hairline, and wore prosthetic teeth. “I was thinking the whole time how he must have felt as a man, that he had led the woman he loved into trouble,” he says. The real Richard was uncomfortable in the role of activist, but he was never ambivalent about the woman he’d chosen to marry. “How easy the door out of that marriage would have been,” Edgerton says. “It was a door he never thought to go through.”
Loving is Nichols’s fifth feature. He’s a Southern white man taking on race and history—in a year when these themes have embroiled the nation. “The last thing I want to be is defensive,” Nichols says on a hot August afternoon in his modest studio in Austin, Texas, not far from the home he shares with his wife, Missy, and their six-year-old, Sam. “Germany has spent a long time coming to terms with its horrors—but in America we’ve never really faced the horrors of slavery and everything that came in its wake. It’s like a wound. Sunlight has to get in there for it to heal.”
A youthful, sandy-haired 37, Nichols is preppily dressed in khakis, a navy polo, and loafers without socks. His previous films include the coming-of-age story Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey, and Midnight Special, a sci-fi thriller that also starred Edgerton. “All of my films have been written and imagined in the South,” he says with a slight Arkansas twang. “I wanted to portray the Southerners I recognized from growing up. I didn’t want to portray them in this horrifying, cartoonish way.”
His studio is stripped down—a desk, a computer, posters of John Carpenter’s Starman and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Hanging beside his desk is a gift from McConaughey—a framed photograph of a boat perched in a tree from the set of Mud, with a plaque that says, well, you wrote it.
Nichols grew up in Little Rock—his father owned a furniture store; his mother was a homemaker—and remains close to his two older brothers (their initials are tattooed on his forearm around a clover). He went to the same Little Rock high school that was notorious for race riots during the 1950s school-integration efforts. The mythology of the civil rights movement, he says, “was invoked in every school assembly.”
Still, when a producer sent him the 2011 HBO documentary The Loving Story, directed by Nancy Buirski, he had never heard of the case. It’s already lore that his wife told him, “If you don’t make this movie, I’m going to divorce you.” But Nichols’s way in was through his maternal grandparents, rural people in whom he recognized the same stoicism as he saw in the Lovings.
Nichols never went to film school. “I couldn’t afford it—and I was young and antsy and wanted to make films out of the gate.” As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he found his coterie, the same small group with whom he still collaborates. Raymond Carver and William Faulkner were as much influences on him as the movies he saw with his father at the Dome Theatre in Little Rock: Lawrence of Arabia, Jaws, Fletch. When asked about his favorite cinematic era, he says, “If I was being honest, the eighties. If I was trying to sound smart, the seventies. If I really thought about it, the sixties.” Nichols’s expansive visual storytelling feels more in sync with Spielberg than with the grungier digital aesthetic of his indie-filmmaking peers.
Loving, the director says, is his most “precise” film to date. “I wanted to get everything right. If I needed to do four more takes, I would do four more takes.” He did a huge amount of research. “Jeff created one of the best gelled-together worlds I’ve seen—like a window into time,” says Edgerton.
“Jeff saw this as the most beautiful love story in the world that’s never been told,” says Negga, who was the first person Nichols auditioned. At first he thought she was too petite. But then, he says, “she spoke in Mildred’s voice. She held her mouth like Mildred.” He didn’t even know she was Irish until he talked to her afterward. “I wasn’t looking for star power,” he says. “I was looking for great actors.” Negga and Edgerton movingly capture the ordinary tenderness between a husband and wife. When asked about their chemistry, Nichols says, “Joel and Ruth liked each other.”
Nichols was intent on verisimilitude: “I didn’t feel comfortable making things up with this story—the jail was the same jail they stayed in. The front shot of the courthouse was the same courthouse.” The couple’s younger son, Donald, and their baby were played by relatives of the real Mildred. He also brought on the Lovings’ only surviving child, Peggy, as a consultant. “Peggy was tough. She was there, watching the scene where they were passing around plates of food over dinner. She said, straight-faced, ‘Well, you got that wrong.’ Then she started laughing. She had an interesting sense of humor.”
The climactic scene in Loving could have taken place solely in the courtroom, but for one thing—the Lovings weren’t there. Nichols used their absence to his advantage, telling the story of that day from the periphery. The couple spent those hours at home, Mildred sewing and cooking, Richard laying bricks and mowing the lawn. The children are shown playing in the yard out front. Earlier, when the lawyers ask Richard if there is anything he’d like to tell the Supreme Court before their trial, he says simply, “Tell the judge I love my wife.” (It’s Negga’s favorite line in the film.) As the camera moves between their family life and the courtroom, the divide between the powerful and the powerless has rarely been laid out so starkly. Here is the Supreme Court trying to decide whether this couple and their children should exist, while far from the grand white steps of the courthouse, they are busy existing. As Edgerton says, “It is a sad happy ending because they win, but nobody can give them back those years.”
Loving v. Virginia once and for all invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in this country. “There was an inevitability to that couple,” says Negga. “They were like the poster couple for the future.”
Source
Loving Star Ruth Negga on Biracial Politics: “I Get Very Territorial About My Identity”
by GABY WOOD
With her mesmerizing performance in Jeff Nichols’s subtly groundbreaking film Loving, the Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga has become a star for our time.
“I’m a rag of a woman today,” Ruth Negga says in her faint Irish accent. She is pointing to her chipped green nail polish and apologizing for her eyebrows. She cut her hair herself, she says, before asking a professional to tidy it up. Earlier today she went to get her passport renewed. “Maybe . . . you could—blend?” the photographer said, gesturing around his face. She took a look and realized she had been quite slapdash with her bronzer and powder.
By lunchtime, there’s no trace of this—with her huge, doll-like eyes and closely cropped hair, she is as glamorous as a thirties aviator in Paige jeans and an olive bomber jacket—but it’s easy enough to imagine Negga dismissing vanity as a fool’s game. Her gift for self-mockery and her appetite for the craic—an Irish expression for fun or gossip or high jinks—are matched only by her levels of propulsion: Her neat, tiny frame always seems to move forward at great speed.
When director Jeff Nichols was trying to get financing for Loving, in which Negga and Joel Edgerton star as Mildred and Richard Loving—the real-life interracial couple whose quest to be considered legally married in 1958 Virginia became a landmark civil-rights case—he kept hearing the same thing: “Who’s Ruth Negga?” Few people are asking that now, but even so, Negga is not offended. “I’ve been working. Keeping a low profile—until bam!” She laughs. “Nothing slow and steady about me.”
I had picked her up at home—a top-floor flat in London’s Primrose Hill, where she lives with her boyfriend and frequent costar, Dominic Cooper—and what felt like seconds after she’d stuck her head out the window and waved at me, she was bounding down the building’s stairs. “Dom’s doing a phone interview,” she said (I could hear a sonorous voice in the background), so we headed back to the street. As we walked to her favorite restaurant, she realized her just-renewed passport was still in her hand and, in one quick, disarming motion, pulled open the collar of her short-sleeved sweater and stuffed the passport into her bra.
If you’ve seen Preacher, the stellar AMC adaptation in which Negga practically blows up the screen as the lethal Tulip O’Hare, you may recognize some of this comic-book dynamism. It comes as no surprise to learn that one of Negga’s preferred forms of exercise is the Israeli martial art Krav ****: Picture a quick-witted pixie trained by Mossad, and you’re almost there. For Negga, the pleasure of playing a Tulip sort of character is that “you get to be goofy in a way only men generally get away with.” (“She takes things that aren’t even meant to be funny and makes them funnier,” says the comedian Seth Rogen, one of the show’s creators.) In life she’s more poised and thoughtful, but just as expressive. Each time we meet, her eyes seem different: flecked with gold, framed by glasses, welling up with tears, or even, at times, presenting a challenge.
Negga is 35 (though she feels she “was about 22 a second ago”), and her powers of transformation are such that she’s been cast, with striking frequency, as people who look and are nothing like her. Tulip is a busty blonde in the original. Nichols thought at first that she was too petite to play Mildred. Six years ago, she became the National Theatre’s first black Ophelia and let a troubling force of revenge seep through her sweetness. She embodies these characters so fully, you forget they could have been otherwise. At a time when most British exports to Hollywood have tended toward the aristocratic, this Irish-Ethiopian actress is a different kind of royalty, a “brilliant chameleon,” in the words of her friend the director Annie Ryan, fit for a world of equal rights and dissolving borders.
In the theater, where she’s had a series of critical successes in Britain, there’s an incredible naturalism about her—“as if she’s short-circuiting technique,” in the words of one writer, “and simply relying on radiance.” On-screen, she can move you or make you laugh while appearing to do very little. Her exquisitely understated turn in Loving as a woman who bravely defends her family sparked rapturous reviews and immediate talk of Oscars. “I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing performances in my life,” Nichols says. “And you know it when you see it. It was uncanny what we were watching happening in front of us.”
Negga knows that Loving is different from anything else she’s done. “There’s often a job that’s a ‘before and after’ for an actor,” she suggests. “This is that kind of job for me.”
The impact was almost instantaneous. After the Cannes premiere, Negga and her cousin David Malone went back to the hotel and had martinis by the pool. There was a restaurant that Negga—in ruby lipstick, finger-waved hair, and a black-lace Marc Jacobs dress—had to walk through to get to the ladies’ room, and, Malone remembers, “someone must have recognized her from the screening, because when she came back there was a standing ovation. All of these people got up and started cheering her and clapping. It was absolutely amazing.”
Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to a white Irish nurse and a black Ethiopian doctor who’d met at Black Lion Hospital. When political violence broke out, four-year-old Ruth and her mother went to Ireland and waited for her father to join them.
“We were going to go to America,” Negga says, “but my dad didn’t get out in time.” Three years later, her father died in a car accident. “We found out in a letter and a phone call,” she remembers. “This was 1988. There wasn’t any grief counseling for kids.” Her mother was devastated and never remarried. “She’s a survivor. Very like Mildred.” Unlike Mildred Loving, though, Negga’s mother didn’t encounter any prejudice from being in an interracial marriage. “My mum never experienced that—I mean, never,” Negga says.
In County Limerick, Negga melded into a large extended family of “about 23 boys.” She remembers having a lot of freedom—“We weren’t allowed in the house from about 9:00 till about 7:00”—and developing an early sense of mischief. “I was an attention seeker,” she says, “always in trouble.” Even now, she confesses, “sometimes Dom says to me, ‘Why do you look like you’ve just stolen a bun?’ ”
She didn’t feel different from her fair-haired cousins, nor was she treated any differently. “I remember thinking, I’m just me. When you’re a kid, you’re just you, aren’t you? It was when I moved to England that I felt it, because I was Irish and black.” She was eleven. She was eventually drawn to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin—none of them obvious influences for a girl from rural Ireland. “I didn’t have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out,” she says. “And I didn’t grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience.”
Negga knew she wanted to be an actor when she saw David Bowie walking down a set of stairs in the eighties fantasy film Labyrinth. That and two other essays in alienation—the dizzying adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and La Haine, a bleak French film about racial violence—made her think, “OK, I’m going to be eighteen soon, so I’ll just go away and figure out how to do that.”
While attending drama school at Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Centre, she took to the work of the obscure Irish dramatist George Fitzmaurice and Seamus Heaney (she would later star in the first production of his Burial at Thebes). Annie Ryan, who gave Negga her first theater job in Dublin, as Lolita, saw her graduation performance and thought, “Oh, my God, I have to work with this girl.”
When Negga was eighteen, her mother took her back to Ethiopia to visit her father’s grave, which she found challenging, as she has found all of her return trips since. “I find it difficult because it was an abrupt sort of ending to a lot of my life,” she explains. “I’m always very careful to say I’m Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I lookEthiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don’t know any of them.” In her early 30s, she decided to have therapy to address the loss of her father. It made her realize, among other things, that her decision to be an actor “was no coincidence. I think it makes me able to access certain things that are quite near to the surface,” she says, “an honesty or something about life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
by GABY WOOD
With her mesmerizing performance in Jeff Nichols’s subtly groundbreaking film Loving, the Irish-Ethiopian actress Ruth Negga has become a star for our time.
“I’m a rag of a woman today,” Ruth Negga says in her faint Irish accent. She is pointing to her chipped green nail polish and apologizing for her eyebrows. She cut her hair herself, she says, before asking a professional to tidy it up. Earlier today she went to get her passport renewed. “Maybe . . . you could—blend?” the photographer said, gesturing around his face. She took a look and realized she had been quite slapdash with her bronzer and powder.
By lunchtime, there’s no trace of this—with her huge, doll-like eyes and closely cropped hair, she is as glamorous as a thirties aviator in Paige jeans and an olive bomber jacket—but it’s easy enough to imagine Negga dismissing vanity as a fool’s game. Her gift for self-mockery and her appetite for the craic—an Irish expression for fun or gossip or high jinks—are matched only by her levels of propulsion: Her neat, tiny frame always seems to move forward at great speed.
When director Jeff Nichols was trying to get financing for Loving, in which Negga and Joel Edgerton star as Mildred and Richard Loving—the real-life interracial couple whose quest to be considered legally married in 1958 Virginia became a landmark civil-rights case—he kept hearing the same thing: “Who’s Ruth Negga?” Few people are asking that now, but even so, Negga is not offended. “I’ve been working. Keeping a low profile—until bam!” She laughs. “Nothing slow and steady about me.”
I had picked her up at home—a top-floor flat in London’s Primrose Hill, where she lives with her boyfriend and frequent costar, Dominic Cooper—and what felt like seconds after she’d stuck her head out the window and waved at me, she was bounding down the building’s stairs. “Dom’s doing a phone interview,” she said (I could hear a sonorous voice in the background), so we headed back to the street. As we walked to her favorite restaurant, she realized her just-renewed passport was still in her hand and, in one quick, disarming motion, pulled open the collar of her short-sleeved sweater and stuffed the passport into her bra.
If you’ve seen Preacher, the stellar AMC adaptation in which Negga practically blows up the screen as the lethal Tulip O’Hare, you may recognize some of this comic-book dynamism. It comes as no surprise to learn that one of Negga’s preferred forms of exercise is the Israeli martial art Krav ****: Picture a quick-witted pixie trained by Mossad, and you’re almost there. For Negga, the pleasure of playing a Tulip sort of character is that “you get to be goofy in a way only men generally get away with.” (“She takes things that aren’t even meant to be funny and makes them funnier,” says the comedian Seth Rogen, one of the show’s creators.) In life she’s more poised and thoughtful, but just as expressive. Each time we meet, her eyes seem different: flecked with gold, framed by glasses, welling up with tears, or even, at times, presenting a challenge.
Negga is 35 (though she feels she “was about 22 a second ago”), and her powers of transformation are such that she’s been cast, with striking frequency, as people who look and are nothing like her. Tulip is a busty blonde in the original. Nichols thought at first that she was too petite to play Mildred. Six years ago, she became the National Theatre’s first black Ophelia and let a troubling force of revenge seep through her sweetness. She embodies these characters so fully, you forget they could have been otherwise. At a time when most British exports to Hollywood have tended toward the aristocratic, this Irish-Ethiopian actress is a different kind of royalty, a “brilliant chameleon,” in the words of her friend the director Annie Ryan, fit for a world of equal rights and dissolving borders.
In the theater, where she’s had a series of critical successes in Britain, there’s an incredible naturalism about her—“as if she’s short-circuiting technique,” in the words of one writer, “and simply relying on radiance.” On-screen, she can move you or make you laugh while appearing to do very little. Her exquisitely understated turn in Loving as a woman who bravely defends her family sparked rapturous reviews and immediate talk of Oscars. “I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing performances in my life,” Nichols says. “And you know it when you see it. It was uncanny what we were watching happening in front of us.”
Negga knows that Loving is different from anything else she’s done. “There’s often a job that’s a ‘before and after’ for an actor,” she suggests. “This is that kind of job for me.”
The impact was almost instantaneous. After the Cannes premiere, Negga and her cousin David Malone went back to the hotel and had martinis by the pool. There was a restaurant that Negga—in ruby lipstick, finger-waved hair, and a black-lace Marc Jacobs dress—had to walk through to get to the ladies’ room, and, Malone remembers, “someone must have recognized her from the screening, because when she came back there was a standing ovation. All of these people got up and started cheering her and clapping. It was absolutely amazing.”
Negga was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to a white Irish nurse and a black Ethiopian doctor who’d met at Black Lion Hospital. When political violence broke out, four-year-old Ruth and her mother went to Ireland and waited for her father to join them.
“We were going to go to America,” Negga says, “but my dad didn’t get out in time.” Three years later, her father died in a car accident. “We found out in a letter and a phone call,” she remembers. “This was 1988. There wasn’t any grief counseling for kids.” Her mother was devastated and never remarried. “She’s a survivor. Very like Mildred.” Unlike Mildred Loving, though, Negga’s mother didn’t encounter any prejudice from being in an interracial marriage. “My mum never experienced that—I mean, never,” Negga says.
In County Limerick, Negga melded into a large extended family of “about 23 boys.” She remembers having a lot of freedom—“We weren’t allowed in the house from about 9:00 till about 7:00”—and developing an early sense of mischief. “I was an attention seeker,” she says, “always in trouble.” Even now, she confesses, “sometimes Dom says to me, ‘Why do you look like you’ve just stolen a bun?’ ”
She didn’t feel different from her fair-haired cousins, nor was she treated any differently. “I remember thinking, I’m just me. When you’re a kid, you’re just you, aren’t you? It was when I moved to England that I felt it, because I was Irish and black.” She was eleven. She was eventually drawn to Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin—none of them obvious influences for a girl from rural Ireland. “I didn’t have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out,” she says. “And I didn’t grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience.”
Negga knew she wanted to be an actor when she saw David Bowie walking down a set of stairs in the eighties fantasy film Labyrinth. That and two other essays in alienation—the dizzying adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and La Haine, a bleak French film about racial violence—made her think, “OK, I’m going to be eighteen soon, so I’ll just go away and figure out how to do that.”
While attending drama school at Trinity College Dublin’s Samuel Beckett Centre, she took to the work of the obscure Irish dramatist George Fitzmaurice and Seamus Heaney (she would later star in the first production of his Burial at Thebes). Annie Ryan, who gave Negga her first theater job in Dublin, as Lolita, saw her graduation performance and thought, “Oh, my God, I have to work with this girl.”
When Negga was eighteen, her mother took her back to Ethiopia to visit her father’s grave, which she found challenging, as she has found all of her return trips since. “I find it difficult because it was an abrupt sort of ending to a lot of my life,” she explains. “I’m always very careful to say I’m Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I lookEthiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don’t know any of them.” In her early 30s, she decided to have therapy to address the loss of her father. It made her realize, among other things, that her decision to be an actor “was no coincidence. I think it makes me able to access certain things that are quite near to the surface,” she says, “an honesty or something about life that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
Nicholas Hytner, who has directed her twice at the National Theatre, sees this quality come through in her work. “She has a wonderful transparency,” he says. “You can see what she’s thinking, share what she’s feeling, without her having to show you anything. And at the same time, she seems to have secrets.”
The subject of how Negga identifies—nationally, racially, or otherwise—is one we circle more than once. “People have always made assumptions about me,” she says. “I become very territorial about my identity because it’s been hijacked by so many people, with their own projections.” Understandably, she doesn’t want to be pinned down, reserving the right to change her mind, about herself or anything else. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t change their mind,” she says.
That quicksilver quality has served her well. As Ryan says, “Maybe there’s something about her being a bit of an outsider, no matter where she is, that gives her that kind of fighter’s edge.”
Two days later, Negga and I meet at Tate Modern. There is an exhibition of work by Wifredo Lam, the Afro-Cuban–Chinese painter, and she wants to see it because Lam reminds her of one of her favorite artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
She arrives in a rush, a small whirlwind in a camel coat and oversize tortoiseshell glasses. “I’m so sorry,” she says, out of breath. Although she’s only a little late, she seems to have made a number of instant friends in the process. The driver has offered to take the blame, and the guards at the museum, it transpires, know her as Ruth. “It’s because they see my face and think, Oh. She’s in trouble,” Negga explains, her childhood as an impish tomboy never far from her mind.
The previous evening was the press night for The Libertine, a play in which Dominic Cooper stars as the lecherous seventeenth-century Earl of Rochester. Friends and family celebrated into the small hours, and the couple awoke to excellent reviews. A coffee seems to be called for. We head to the café, where Negga asked the waiter for “75 shots.” She is given to energetic exaggeration and peppers her speech with profanity for emphasis—which makes the economy of her performance in Loving all the more remarkable.
“We were very nervous,” she says as we perch on stools looking out over the murky Thames. Then she corrects herself. “I was nervous. They’re awful, press nights. But, you know, it’s a nice support group.”
Cooper and Negga have been together since playing Greek lovers in Phèdre—written by Ted Hughes and starring Helen Mirren in the title role—in 2009.
“Seven years,” Negga reflects. “What’s that in. . . .”
“Dog years?” I offer.
“Actor years,” she says. “Forty-nine million!”
She describes their working pattern as “brilliant. Because we just get on really well.” Their costarring in Preacherwasn’t entirely planned, however. “I had the script first. And he put me on tape for it, reading, and then he was like: ‘Hold on a minute; this is really good.’ I showed him the comic-book cover, and it’s basically his face.”
Rogen reports that Preacher benefits from their having known each other a long time. “When you understand the person you’re working with, it doesn’t always make everything easier,” he says, laughing a little, “but it generally makes everything better.”
As we wander through the gallery, Negga sees a Lam painting she likes—a small explosion of sinister, deconstructed figures—and makes a Chaplinesque gesture, as if to steal it. A security guard appears out of nowhere and intervenes, treating her more or less like a small child. “See?” Negga says in a stage whisper as we quickly move into the next room.
She tells me she painted a lot as a girl, but when I ask if she does now, she wrinkles her nose.
“I don’t like hobbies,” she says emphatically. In the little spare time she has, she says, “I read and travel and see my friends before they disown me.” She has just finished Patti Smith’s memoir M Train and is about to embark on Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time. As for the future, she’d love to work with Jeff Nichols again and maybe do a biopic about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan. For now, though, she can’t think much beyond the second season of Preacher, which she’ll finish filming in July. “I really need a holiday after that.”
When we next speak, Negga is in New York, on her way to the airport, and is shattered. She has spent virtually every waking hour since we last met promoting Loving. “My voice has dropped 72 octaves, and I sound like an emphysemic 80-year-old,” she says. She has found the whole process of being herself in public “terrifying.” She was once in a play in which she had to be naked every night for eight months, and claims that was “far easier” than a minute with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.
More seriously, though, she is all too aware that Loving has come at a moment of reckoning with America’s troubled history and current racial turmoil. In Hollywood, the lack of diversity has been “unacceptable for a long time, and it’s becoming clearly an embarrassment,” she says. Though she is beginning to see a shift, with the release of films like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, there is still much more to be done. She is proud that Loving was the first full-length film to be screened at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. As Negga explains, “The film is reminding us that there’s a conversation that we need to be having still.” Though restrained in its style, Loving gestures strongly toward something much broader. “It does annoy Joel and me when people say it’s a quiet film,” she says. “Because it doesn’t feel very quiet to us. It feels really loud.”
Source
The subject of how Negga identifies—nationally, racially, or otherwise—is one we circle more than once. “People have always made assumptions about me,” she says. “I become very territorial about my identity because it’s been hijacked by so many people, with their own projections.” Understandably, she doesn’t want to be pinned down, reserving the right to change her mind, about herself or anything else. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t change their mind,” she says.
That quicksilver quality has served her well. As Ryan says, “Maybe there’s something about her being a bit of an outsider, no matter where she is, that gives her that kind of fighter’s edge.”
Two days later, Negga and I meet at Tate Modern. There is an exhibition of work by Wifredo Lam, the Afro-Cuban–Chinese painter, and she wants to see it because Lam reminds her of one of her favorite artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
She arrives in a rush, a small whirlwind in a camel coat and oversize tortoiseshell glasses. “I’m so sorry,” she says, out of breath. Although she’s only a little late, she seems to have made a number of instant friends in the process. The driver has offered to take the blame, and the guards at the museum, it transpires, know her as Ruth. “It’s because they see my face and think, Oh. She’s in trouble,” Negga explains, her childhood as an impish tomboy never far from her mind.
The previous evening was the press night for The Libertine, a play in which Dominic Cooper stars as the lecherous seventeenth-century Earl of Rochester. Friends and family celebrated into the small hours, and the couple awoke to excellent reviews. A coffee seems to be called for. We head to the café, where Negga asked the waiter for “75 shots.” She is given to energetic exaggeration and peppers her speech with profanity for emphasis—which makes the economy of her performance in Loving all the more remarkable.
“We were very nervous,” she says as we perch on stools looking out over the murky Thames. Then she corrects herself. “I was nervous. They’re awful, press nights. But, you know, it’s a nice support group.”
Cooper and Negga have been together since playing Greek lovers in Phèdre—written by Ted Hughes and starring Helen Mirren in the title role—in 2009.
“Seven years,” Negga reflects. “What’s that in. . . .”
“Dog years?” I offer.
“Actor years,” she says. “Forty-nine million!”
She describes their working pattern as “brilliant. Because we just get on really well.” Their costarring in Preacherwasn’t entirely planned, however. “I had the script first. And he put me on tape for it, reading, and then he was like: ‘Hold on a minute; this is really good.’ I showed him the comic-book cover, and it’s basically his face.”
Rogen reports that Preacher benefits from their having known each other a long time. “When you understand the person you’re working with, it doesn’t always make everything easier,” he says, laughing a little, “but it generally makes everything better.”
As we wander through the gallery, Negga sees a Lam painting she likes—a small explosion of sinister, deconstructed figures—and makes a Chaplinesque gesture, as if to steal it. A security guard appears out of nowhere and intervenes, treating her more or less like a small child. “See?” Negga says in a stage whisper as we quickly move into the next room.
She tells me she painted a lot as a girl, but when I ask if she does now, she wrinkles her nose.
“I don’t like hobbies,” she says emphatically. In the little spare time she has, she says, “I read and travel and see my friends before they disown me.” She has just finished Patti Smith’s memoir M Train and is about to embark on Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time. As for the future, she’d love to work with Jeff Nichols again and maybe do a biopic about the Irish writer Maeve Brennan. For now, though, she can’t think much beyond the second season of Preacher, which she’ll finish filming in July. “I really need a holiday after that.”
When we next speak, Negga is in New York, on her way to the airport, and is shattered. She has spent virtually every waking hour since we last met promoting Loving. “My voice has dropped 72 octaves, and I sound like an emphysemic 80-year-old,” she says. She has found the whole process of being herself in public “terrifying.” She was once in a play in which she had to be naked every night for eight months, and claims that was “far easier” than a minute with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show.
More seriously, though, she is all too aware that Loving has come at a moment of reckoning with America’s troubled history and current racial turmoil. In Hollywood, the lack of diversity has been “unacceptable for a long time, and it’s becoming clearly an embarrassment,” she says. Though she is beginning to see a shift, with the release of films like Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, there is still much more to be done. She is proud that Loving was the first full-length film to be screened at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. As Negga explains, “The film is reminding us that there’s a conversation that we need to be having still.” Though restrained in its style, Loving gestures strongly toward something much broader. “It does annoy Joel and me when people say it’s a quiet film,” she says. “Because it doesn’t feel very quiet to us. It feels really loud.”
Source
Ruth Negga on ‘Loving,’ ‘Preacher’ and Fashion
Golden Globe nominee Ruth Negga discusses her roles in the film "Loving" and the AMC show "Preacher," and talks about her favorite fashions.
By Lindzi Scharf
One of awards season breakout stars, Ethopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga, who is up for Best Actress for her role in “Loving” at this Sunday’s Golden Globes, has already been winning on the red carpet. In addition to playing Mildred Loving opposite Joel Edgerton’s Richard Loving, Negga plays the lead opposite her real-life beau Dominic Cooper in AMC’s supernatural dark comedy “Preacher.” She’s also appeared in “World War Z” and “Warcraft.” WWD caught up with the 34-year-old on Tuesday afternoon in Palm Springs.
Why did Mildred Loving’s story resonate with you?
I was surprised that Richard and Mildred Loving’s story wasn’t more well-known. I’m drawn to stories that give voice to people who may not be the loudest voice in the room or maybe who have been forgotten by history. It’s a deeply human, humane story about love, but also what interests me is people refusing to be told who to be, who to marry, and refusing to be quieted. That’s important because I think black women in history have been quieted and their voices have maybe not been heard and their stories not told. But I think that’s changing now, isn’t it? I think Jeff’s film is part of that conversation.
You were honored last night at Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala. And you’re up for a Golden Globe on Sunday. Not a bad start to the New Year.
It’s lovely. People are really responding to the film. I’ve been moved by that. It’s so gratifying because that’s why we do this job. The response has been overwhelmingly joyful. All this attention is so lovely for us because it is quite a quiet film, but I think we really, truly believe that this couple deserves for their story to be told and people deserve to hear it. Hopefully, this will bring more people into contact with this couple.
What do you do to prep for the red carpet?
I have a wonderful stylist Karla Welch. She does all of that for me and I’m so grateful. She has such a creative eye and it’s original. She psychic-ly gets in tune with her clients. She knows what you want and desire and what makes you feel confident as well as comfortable. I think that’s a great feat.
What do you look for in a dress?
Gosh…I like things that are unique and are a bit original and creative. I love Valentino, Louis Vuitton and Prada. And the Rodarte sisters are amazing.
What can you tell us about your Golden Globes dress?
I’ve done the fitting, but I haven’t seen the finished product. It’s going to be exciting. It’s beautiful and it’s quite dramatic.
Following award season, what’s next for you?
I don’t really have plans. I think I’ll try and search out the projects that interest me that I think I’ll be happiest doing. For the moment, I’m working on “Preacher Season Two.” I go back in a month or so. My character Tulip O’Hare is a breath of brilliantly strange, fresh air. She’s a unique, original character and I think there’s not many people like that on screen. It’s a privilege to play her.
What can you share about next season of the show?
Nothing!
Source
Golden Globe nominee Ruth Negga discusses her roles in the film "Loving" and the AMC show "Preacher," and talks about her favorite fashions.
By Lindzi Scharf
One of awards season breakout stars, Ethopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga, who is up for Best Actress for her role in “Loving” at this Sunday’s Golden Globes, has already been winning on the red carpet. In addition to playing Mildred Loving opposite Joel Edgerton’s Richard Loving, Negga plays the lead opposite her real-life beau Dominic Cooper in AMC’s supernatural dark comedy “Preacher.” She’s also appeared in “World War Z” and “Warcraft.” WWD caught up with the 34-year-old on Tuesday afternoon in Palm Springs.
Why did Mildred Loving’s story resonate with you?
I was surprised that Richard and Mildred Loving’s story wasn’t more well-known. I’m drawn to stories that give voice to people who may not be the loudest voice in the room or maybe who have been forgotten by history. It’s a deeply human, humane story about love, but also what interests me is people refusing to be told who to be, who to marry, and refusing to be quieted. That’s important because I think black women in history have been quieted and their voices have maybe not been heard and their stories not told. But I think that’s changing now, isn’t it? I think Jeff’s film is part of that conversation.
You were honored last night at Palm Springs International Film Festival Awards Gala. And you’re up for a Golden Globe on Sunday. Not a bad start to the New Year.
It’s lovely. People are really responding to the film. I’ve been moved by that. It’s so gratifying because that’s why we do this job. The response has been overwhelmingly joyful. All this attention is so lovely for us because it is quite a quiet film, but I think we really, truly believe that this couple deserves for their story to be told and people deserve to hear it. Hopefully, this will bring more people into contact with this couple.
What do you do to prep for the red carpet?
I have a wonderful stylist Karla Welch. She does all of that for me and I’m so grateful. She has such a creative eye and it’s original. She psychic-ly gets in tune with her clients. She knows what you want and desire and what makes you feel confident as well as comfortable. I think that’s a great feat.
What do you look for in a dress?
Gosh…I like things that are unique and are a bit original and creative. I love Valentino, Louis Vuitton and Prada. And the Rodarte sisters are amazing.
What can you tell us about your Golden Globes dress?
I’ve done the fitting, but I haven’t seen the finished product. It’s going to be exciting. It’s beautiful and it’s quite dramatic.
Following award season, what’s next for you?
I don’t really have plans. I think I’ll try and search out the projects that interest me that I think I’ll be happiest doing. For the moment, I’m working on “Preacher Season Two.” I go back in a month or so. My character Tulip O’Hare is a breath of brilliantly strange, fresh air. She’s a unique, original character and I think there’s not many people like that on screen. It’s a privilege to play her.
What can you share about next season of the show?
Nothing!
Source
You're welcome @lanasyogamama . She's really something and so talented. And her presence... she's just electric and stunning with a unique look. I really like that she wears clothes with such confidence. Truly refreshing!
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