Ruth Negga: 'I didn't feel my biracial heritage was a problem growing up in Limerick'
The quiet Irish actor may be on the cusp of mega-stardom but she hasn’t lost sight of her craft
By Donald Clarke
Ruth Negga accommodates a rare combination of strength and frailty. She professes to nervousness when speaking in public. She talks sincerely of a need to hide from the world. But few other actors display her steady focus. There are all kinds of typhoons raging beneath the becalmed surface.
Last May, I watched her address a press conference at
Cannes after the first screening of Jeff Nichols’s deeply moving
Loving. Telling the story of Mildred and
Richard Loving, the
Virginia couple whose 1967 case helped dismantle that state’s miscegenation laws, the film was greeted with warm waves of applause. The Oscar rumours that began then have persisted to the brink of next week’s nominations
Negga seemed confident, controlled and unfazed when greeting the press.
“Oh, it was my first time talking in public,” she says, with something like a shudder. “I was quite tired. We’d wrapped
Preacher the day beforehand. I flew to LA for the premiere of that. I then went straight to the airport and flew to Cannes. It was very discombobulating.”
This is surprising. Now 35, Negga is finally approaching stardom – thanks to turns such as that in the zippy TV series
Preacher – but she has had her shoulder to the wheel for well over a decade, including a role in the acclaimed Irish series
Love/Hate. You can catch sight of her in Neil Jordan’s
Breakfast on Pluto from 2005. She has had a regular role in the BBC’s
Misfits. She has played
Shirley Bassey, for heaven’s sake. Yet she admits to nervousness when put before journalists.
“All that is daunting,” she says. “It’s nerve-racking. I want to do myself justice and I want to do the work justice. I don’t want to get in the way of what I am doing, which is speaking about something very special to me: my work. I am also very shy about public speaking. Being on stage – or on camera – and speaking in front of people as oneself are very different things.”
Negga speaks quietly, but with crystalline clarity, in a voice that still bears traces of her
Limerick upbringing. You get a sense of her weighing each word’s place within each cautiously chosen clause.
“I became an actor to hide. We all become actors to hide, to disappear. So, the idea of having no script is daunting.”
A mildly disconcerting concentration has now set in. Perhaps without meaning to, Negga has, within a few minutes, talked herself round to her core motivation. What is she hiding from? Will she always need to hide?
“It’s quite simple,” she says (as if it really were). “You’re shy. But just because you’re shy doesn’t mean you don’t have extrovert qualities. Acting is a safe way of expressing those qualities and interests without coming under fire for being yourself.”
You can always say that somebody else wrote this?
“Yes, yes. That’s it. Ha-ha!”
Biracial heritage
Let us investigate further. Ruth Negga, daughter of an Irish nurse and an Ethiopian doctor, was born in
Addis Ababa in 1985. When she was just four years old, the country descended into political violence, and she returned home to
Ireland with her mother.
The plan was that her father would follow and they would move to the
United States. Tragically, Dr Negga died in a car crash before making it back to his young family. Negga eventually got to visit his grave in
Ethiopia when she was 18.
Quite a few international profiles of Negga tell us that she grew up in “rural Ireland”. The good people of
Dooradoyle might disagree. A suburb of Limerick city, it boasts a big cinema, a huge hospital and the shopping centre where this writer bought his second David Bowie LP. Over the last few decades, Dooradoyle has become more racially diverse, but I imagine there were not many people of colour there when Negga was a child. She has, however, always argued that she suffered little racial prejudice when she was young.
“People are shocked when they hear that,” she says slightly wearily. “In Dooradoyle? Well, it’s very simple. That never happened. When people ask me, I think they are looking for something that wasn’t there. You have to take a person’s word for it. People have very unique lives. I just didn’t feel my biracial heritage was a problem growing up Limerick.”
Understandably enough, as she promotes
Loving, a film about a black woman and a white man fighting prejudice, she is asked whether her mother suffered similar degrees of antagonism in Ireland. Negga remembers little of that.
“People assume certain things about what ought to have happened in your life,” she says. “It’s fascinating. People can’t cope with particulars, things that don’t fit into their experience. If you go off-piste with your history, then they need you to reclarify.”
She pauses and pulls on a cryptic smile. “Maybe that’s why I became an actor.”
Negga studied drama at
Trinity College Dublin and went on to work steadily in theatre. In 2006, she made the jump and moved to London where she still lives with her partner, the equally pulchritudinous actor
Dominic Cooper.
At this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Negga is nominated for the EE Rising Star award. She would be too well mannered to complain, but she has surely long ago “risen”. (Three of the other four nominees are more than a decade younger.)
In 2010, she played an acclaimed Ophelia to Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre. In 2011, her turn as Shirley Bassey in the BBC’s
Shirley fairly rattled the windows and shook the foundations.
Nuanced performance
There have been some disappointments. Her scenes in
12 Years a Slave were cut from the final film. However, I get the sense that Negga has had few quiet periods. There can’t have been many occasions when she felt tempted to throw it all in and become a carpenter (or whatever).
“Well, the further down the line you go the more that window of opportunity closes,” she says with a laugh. “The worst part is when you don’t get parts that you would have loved. Also, when you get a part and it evolves into something different. Being cut out of things is hard. If you are feeling delicate, the round of auditions that result in a ‘no’ can be painful.”
She shakes herself and smiles ruefully.
“You do know that’s part of the process. But that doesn’t make the hurt any less. I am really not fond of people who say, ‘surely you knew that going in’. You can know something and still be upset. That doesn’t really make it any less hurtful.”
At any rate, that understated, nuanced performance in
Loving has pushed her celebrity to another level. Playing a real person offers particular challenges to an actor. A balance must be struck between impersonation and creating a compelling character.
Most viewers will know little about
Mildred Loving. The trials are, thus, different to those faced when playing Shirley Bassey. It seems hard to credit, but, as recently as 1967, Mildred Loving and her white husband, with the assistance of the
American Civil Liberties Union, went before the US supreme court to protest their conviction for defying Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act. They won the case and prohibitions against “inter-racial marriage” were deemed unconstitutional.