Thandie Newton on the ‘Tragedy’ of Trump and Her ‘F*cking Awful’ Time Exposing Hollywood Abuse

“A big part of my adult life has been trying to reverse shame,” says Thandie Newton. “Shame is a wicked, wicked thing.”

She sighs, and takes another sip of tea. “My greatest fortune was being different to everybody else—which was also my greatest unhappiness.”

Prior to her award-winning turn as Maeve, a sentient android who lays waste to the patriarchy on Westworld, and standout performances in films like Crash, RocknRolla and The Truth About Charlie, where she even managed to make Marky Mark in a beret not seem entirely preposterous, Newton was preyed on by a Hollywood movie director.

According to Newton, during a callback for a role, the director—with a camera trained directly up her skirt—asked her to “think about the guy making love to me in a scene” while fondling her breasts. Seeing a female casting director in the room, she did it. Years later, a drunk producer approached her at Cannes, informing her that the director had been screening the audition tape for his buddies. Newton refused to stay silent—first speaking out about the abuse to CNN in 2013 and again in interviews thereafter. But her pleas for industry-wide change fell on deaf ears.

So Newton, the daughter of a white Englishman and a Zimbabwean princess of the Shona people, channeled her anger into grassroots activism, redoubling her humanitarian efforts in Africa and at home in the U.K. Along the way, she befriended Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy who, knowing Newton’s passion for telling authentic stories about Africa, told her of a project her Saving Face cinematographer Aaron Kopp and his partner Amanda were working on in Swaziland called Liyana.

Liyana, which is executive-produced by Newton, is part documentary, part animated fable. It centers on the Likhaya Lemphilo Lensha, an orphanage in Swaziland, where author and activist Gcina Mhlophe is holding a storytelling workshop, asking the children to mine their imaginations and create an epic Swazi tale. The kids ultimately tell the story of Liyana, a young Swazi girl whose parents fall victim to AIDS. One night, thieves invade her home, snatching her twin brothers and, after a vicious assault, leave her for dead. But Liyana will not be deterred. With the help of her bull, she embarks on a perilous quest to find her kidnapped siblings.

The story hit close to home for Newton, who saw herself—and her mother, Nyasha—in Liyana. She tells me a story from her mother’s childhood in Zimbabwe, when little Nyasha was on watch to make sure animals didn’t invade their orange grove. While on lookout duty, she spotted the juiciest, tallest fruit in the tree and reached for it, only to tumble down from the watchtower and break her arm. Newton shows me a tattoo on her right forearm of the word Mapinza, from the Shona. “It’s the kid that wants to do what they shouldn’t,” she says, flashing a grin. “My mum was that kid, and I was that kid, and when you call someone a Mapinza it’s derogatory—but I see it as a really good thing.”

With that, we begin.

It is a really beautiful film, and weaves so seamlessly between the animated fable and real life at the orphanage. There’s one scene in particular that had me on the most pins and needles of maybe any film this year, where one of the young boys is anxiously awaiting the results of his HIV test.

Yeah—because you really don’t know how it’s going to go, and you understand the world that they’re in. If it had been positive, it would be in keeping with what has already been set up, because it’s real. If you had that scene set in this country, there’s no way that they would want to put that out there in a movie like this.

It just speaks to how effective the film is in taking us in and out of the animated tale.

It took a long time, man. Years and years—at least five or six years, in part because funding was difficult for a film like this, so it had to be done in bits and pieces. But thank goodness they had that amount of time. Two filmmakers gave their all for this passion project, and a lot of people came onboard without any desire for monetary gain, like myself, and the result is sublime. It’s a lesson in the kinds of things you should invest in, in a way: long-term projects that take time. Thank god for documentary filmmakers—for their patience and not needing the luxuries in life.

There is a depressing dearth of stories like this, authentic African stories that aren’t about war or armed conflict, that make it to the screens of western audiences.

A couple of things need to take place: stopping the current stereotype of “otherness” with African people as personality-less, feeling-less, simple people who don’t feel pain or anguish like we do, which is complete nonsense. We lose a kid here and it’s horrific; a family losing three kids there is three times as horrific as what we’re feeling. There’s a weird sense that pain is different there. It’s the shit that’s put in your head, and the constant images of poverty and scantily-clad, no-shoes people. Here’s the thing: my mum grew up in that environment, in Zimbabwe. She didn’t have a pair of shoes until she was eight years old, had one dress. The stereotype of that is “tragic,” but you see it in the kids in this film—there’s more tenacity, more courage, more hope and more joy than a regular kid of that age in a “privileged” world. We have a lot to learn.

And our interconnectedness with Africa isn’t just about humanity but about the resources that we are using there. Whether it’s gold or mineral wealth—it’s been pillaged—we rely on these things, so we have a duty to at least start to create an equilibrium that makes sense for the health of the world. The planet’s health is also about connecting with people from a place that has been exploited to a degree that is solvable. The planet’s health is about balance. And hearing stories from that part of the world, and becoming infected by the true emotion and personality of these kids, helps create a kinship that will ultimately improve the health of our planet. 

We talked about the lack of connectedness to—or empathy for—Africa in the West, and that mindset is epitomized by President Trump, who notoriously called several African countries “shithole countries.”

He doesn’t travel outside the very small construct of his brain.

It’s a coincidence of course, but this film is being released just as first lady Melania Trump has returned from a trip to Africa. And she was wearing a colonial white pith helmet whilst on safari in Nairobi, which many found to be highly insensitive.

No! No… Why was she doing that? That’s surreal. I wish I could manifest a cell of interest in that, I just couldn’t give a shit. But of course it is important.

It’s important because the Trump administration has tried to slash funding for USAID in Africa—twice. Many saw the first lady’s trip there as hypocritical given that. But it’s really a lack of education about the region that leads people down these paths.

Here’s the thing: Denis Mukwege, someone who I’ve known for ten years through the work that I do with V-Day in the Congo, just won the Nobel Prize, and a couple of days later [Brett] Kavanaugh was appointed [to the Supreme Court]. I was high from Mukwege’s honor, and I couldn’t feel depressed because of it. It’s a weird one, because they’re just examples of two people in different parts of the world, and one is intricately linked to the other—in terms of the power of the United States and the lack of power of Africa on the world stage—but I see Africa as incredibly powerful because of the resources it has, and because of the tenacity of the people there.

In my small way, it’s a microcosm of a bigger thing. I tried for quite a long time to engage with the film industry about sexual violence within the industry and was repeatedly brushed aside. And I found myself becoming an activist—people that don’t wait for permission from the industry or the political sphere. You work with grassroots, because that’s actually where change happens day-to-day. And that’s where I’ve been for the last twenty years. Not waiting for permission has been a huge change in my life.

I remember that. And you were pretty much on an island when it came to discussing your experience with sexual abuse in Hollywood.

It was so not cool to talk about that. I lost work. I lost friends. I had a publicist who told me that it was “bad for my reputation” to talk about my experience—this was fifteen years ago. But I had to keep talking about it. I was traumatized. I met Eve Ensler, and started having therapy, and realized that it was criminal behavior. I was horrified, and it was rife in the industry. The idea of silencing myself was like—I may as well die. Every day I go to work and do this stuff. I call it out. Because how could you not? It’s like seeing someone bleeding on the street. Then again, people do walk by people bleeding on the street.

And it led you to Westworld, which is in a sense one big call-out.

There you go. Yeah, and it’s not like, “Oh, I’m so brilliant”—it really isn’t, because I’ve had a shit time, man. With the amount of doubts I felt because no one else… even my family really found it horrible that I would talk about it. They felt targeted by people’s opinions. It’s not a nice thing to be related to it. It’s like every fucking story connected back to, “Oh, she says that she was abused by this director,” and I just didn’t care. Because it was real. But a lot of other things are real too, and it also allowed me to stop thinking about myself and start thinking about other people, because I just realized that I could help people who were in far worse situations than an actress who’d been abused by a film director. Yes, it was fucking awful, but I’ve released that from myself—it’s kind of pre-history now—and there are people in the world who don’t even have an industry to be in, or any kind of protection, or any kind of voice.

And there does seem, certainly in the States, to be an erasure of black and brown victims when we talk about things like sexual violence.

Oh god, yes.

And even with these movements, like Me Too and Time’s Up, most of the public-facing “leaders” of these movements are not people of color.

That’s why I’ve been working alongside the brilliant law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who started the African American Policy Forum. She created #SayHerName, which is about how the victims of police brutality—we only hear about guys, and the number of black women who are killed by police is horrific. You look at Daniel Holtzclaw, who systemically raped women of color as a police officer. I remember at the time we made the movie Crash I thought, “For us to be putting this out as a possibility is so dangerous, because how could this possibly be real?” And yet there it is, and a hundred-million percent worse. We don’t hear about these women, and it takes people like Kimberlé Crenshaw to shine a light on it.

But it takes so long to change laws, and it doesn’t fucking help when you have someone appointed to the Supreme Court who’s going to be there a long time—and that’s why it was so horrific, because laws take a long time to be passed, and they take a long time to be fought and undone. And the current administration in the United States, the unraveling of the fabric of justice and progressiveness, is an unprecedented tragedy.

It seems like the last gasp of the dinosaurs. When you looked at those people on the Senate Judiciary Committee questioning Kavanaugh, the most vociferous ones were old white men.

Where there’s greatest progress, there’s greatest resistance. And they’re clinging on. You look at the kids walking out from schools over gun control, the protests. I see my daughter, who at the age of 16 was outside of the Houses of Parliament in England demanding for the voting age to be lowered to 16, because she thought, “I’ve got to take power out of the hands of these people who are so out of touch.”

Let’s wrap things up by going back to Liyana. What would you like western audiences to take away from the film?

I find myself in so many situations where I’m “preaching to the converted,” and I would love for a story like Liyana to find its way into the homes and minds and hearts of people who think they have an idea of who an African child is, and come to actually meet and yearn for a connection with a Swazi kid. Africa is enormous. You can’t even define someone as “African.” It’s preposterous. I remember my first interview with the Hollywood Foreign Press, and I won’t specify who it was, but they asked me to sign my name “in African.” He’s still a member of the Hollywood Foreign Press. I was like, wow, we’ve got a long way to go, man.