Interview: Thandie Newton

Published on Friday 13 June 2008 13:54

Thandie Newton plays the power games of celebrity to increase her influence – for her career and now a cause close to her heart.

WHEN VOLVIC CONTACTED Thandie Newton about fronting their 1L-for-10L for Africa initiative, she was wary. The Bafta-winning A-lister, who launched her career at the tender age of 16 with the sweet Australian comedy Flirting, is used to being approached about being the poster girl for any number of charities. Seeing the business end of so many good causes has taught her that marketing is everything.

"I immediately assumed it was a publicity stunt to help Volvic sell more water, and actually my family had just switched over to using tap water," she says. "But I was completely inspired by their partners, the World Vision team. I talked frankly and openly with them and asked, 'Do you really feel good about this?' They said, 'We've been given a million quid and what we do with it is a miracle.' That was it for me. I have come to believe bottled waters are here to stay. So to support a company that has genuine interest in these ethical programmes – I would rather buy them. It makes sense."

Her voice, soft and lovely, purrs down the telephone connection from her north London home. Stereotypes tell us it's foolish to hope that a dazzling beauty who makes her living reading others' words by day, peacocking along the red carpet by night, might have brains, too, but Newton defies expectations. Her words roll out in great blocks of text, demonstrating the intelligence that earned her a 2.1 in Anthropology from Cambridge. As she speaks I sense she's someone who contemplates issues in three dimensions, circling them slowly, assessing what is and envisaging what could be.

Pragmatic without being cynical, she recognises the value of the insider's edge. "I would much rather have an inside conversation where I can say, 'A number of other manufacturers have switched to corn-based, biodegradable bottles, how about it?'

"But look," she adds, "there are always snags. Like I switched my car from a BMW X5 to a Prius, then I got a lot of feedback, 'You know the Prius battery takes up so much fuel.' I said that's all very well, but as soon as you make a change in your life, there is a domino effect from becoming more conscious – and not just about the environment. It's like dieting, as soon as you watch what you eat, you will be a healthier person. If I do anything in becoming allies with this campaign, it's just to encourage more consciousness."

With Volvic and World Vision, Newton paid a four-day visit to Mali. They stopped off at a community that benefits from one of the new mechanised wells, and another that hasn't got theirs yet. "We were there to deliver the news that it's going to happen and they partied from seven in the morning and were still partying when we left – the whole village!"

Newton was struck by the villagers' lust for life, something in short supply in the first world, with its vastly different concerns and pace. "One of the journalists travelling with us said (she adopts a sanctimonious voice] 'Is it heartbreaking going into these villages?' I said No! Instead, I was humbled and embarrassed by just how easily I can slip into disappointment and melancholy about things. I felt inspired at their optimism and tenacity. They're really living life.

"The only time I felt really sobered was at the medical centre in the village that did not benefit from water. What struck me was how filthy it was. It's tidy, but filthy. Because if they have to queue up for three hours to get a bucket of water they're not going to use that water to clean stuff, they're going to use it for food, cooking, for drinking, for watering the garden, and there's none left for cleaning!"

Speaking as someone who's never been, I have always considered Africa a land of enormous contrasts, I say. "I'll tell you what," she replies, "the number of posters for Orange mobile phones! In this community that didn't have water there were at least three people chatting on phones, yet they didn't have this mechanised pump. OK, that's the way it is. Orange is giving people more access to phones than they have to basic resources. I think we've got to contact Orange and say let's do some kind of celebration, maybe the Orange Music Festival, and you put a couple of million into providing some kind of electric supply in each village. How are people going to power up their batteries on your frigging phones? In the medical centre they have this newfangled, electric device, but it wasn't working because the battery's run out and they have no way of firing it up! insane! But that's the thing, there are these breaks in the chain.

"I queued up (at the well] with these sassy, cool women, who all were just laughing and slapping their thighs when I said I was black. I was white through and through to them. I said back in England I'm considered dark skinned. They said no, no, no. There was a beautiful Senegalese woman who works for World Vision with skin the colour of dark chocolate, and the kids referred to her as white. It's more about the air of difference we come with and not the colour of our skin. That, to me, was more sophisticated and telling, that it's about our bearing and what we are bringing."

And what they brought, in addition to hope and an excuse to celebrate, was fear. "There were kids who were weeping and running away because they were so scared of us, because we were so strange and 'other'. There was a translator who worked with us, a college graduate from West Africa, in his twenties, handsome, educated, all that good stuff. We'd been working really hard for a few days – I was being filmed the whole time so I couldn't fart or yawn or be seen to be unenthusiastic or knackered – and on the last day we had a chance to relax together and I found out that as a teen this young man saw his father shot and killed in front of him. Nothing in his bearing revealed that fact. There's an endurance, a sense that this is part of their daily life. There isn't the luxury to be traumatised. That's what the tenacity and the optimism and the lust for life comes from – these people know hard times. Really hard times. That's why little kids ran away from us. Damn right! You run as fast as you can!"

How surreal it must be, I suggest, going from queuing to fetch water, to the glitz and glamour of New York Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute Gala, held in Manhattan last month, where she trod the red carpet in lacy black Chanel and mingled with an international cast of celebrities from fashion and film.

Someone else might gush and gurn, but Newton's wry wit and shrewd self-assessment blow the bull straight out of the frame. "It's all very practical. I know that if I'm seen at these events there's a lot of power that one can wield. At the beginning of our chat I highlighted marketing. I've come to really be aware of its power. It's the difference between an actor making it or not. It's a cunning area of expertise and extremely powerful. And marketing is all about global; you don't need it if you're a small deli servicing a small community. In a way I wish we could get back to basing our lives in communities and becoming more self-sufficient. That's a whole other thing and it's not gonna happen!

"The reason I get that dress on at the Baftas, the reason I command attention at those things is because I know that I can then become the poster girl for World Vision. I know that Hello! magazine will put in a five- page spread; I know that Vogue will do a piece: it is going to be extremely powerful in marketing terms.

"Otherwise why would I bother? I've been married for ten years. I've got my family. I don't want people at my doorstep taking photos of us in our pyjamas."

She knows the aftermath of these nights out is the media bitchfest critiquing everyone's outfits, hair and poise. The simplest way round that is to ignore it, and she and husband, screenwriter and director Ol Parker, took the decision a year ago to ban magazines from the house. "I don't like finding myself sitting on the loo reading about someone else's life. A magazine comes in because mummy's in it, but suddenly I'm reading about some poor celebrity who's just shaved all her hair off and isn't getting the help she needs, even though she's obviously crying for help. She's being documented as opposed to being helped. It makes me ache over it. I want to be one less person who is (looking]."

Newton has spoken publicly about having bulimia as a teenager, and battling rock-bottom self-esteem, and I wonder how this, plus the constant media scrutiny, affects the way she raises her daughters. We agree that blaming the media is missing the point. "All these kinds of self harming come from a deep place within us, which is a lot to do with childhood. "As the mother of two girls, (Ripley, seven and Nico, three], it's fantastic to realise that the job I have to do is to instil self respect and compassion and love in my children."

Is it true she praises their strength, rather than stressing their looks? "Yeah. If Ripley is doing some crazy jujitsu move, I'll say, 'look at your beautiful, strong body. Look at your amazing dexterous hands, just to be more specific about this incredible machine that she has at her disposal. When I had Rip I didn't want her to consider herself female first, person second; I didn't want her to limit herself."

The irony, as hardly needs stating, is that Thandie Newton is one of the world's great beauties. Thanks, she says, but hastens to point out that for many years she was considered anything but because she was a little black girl growing up in very white Cornwall. "My looks have never been important to me, except in a practical way. It's all about perception. Some people will consider me this, other people will consider me that, why should I take the effort in trying to make myself look gorgeous if it's not going to be the same for everyone? I'm lucky in a way because I was a little bit persecuted for not being attractive, and I have had some traumatic experiences as a result – not Malian traumatic! English traumatic," she laughs. "Tiny, pathetic, really, but I was dismissed as black and therefore unattractive, so being beautiful, whatever, is a device and I am going to use it. It's not connected to how I value myself.

"You know how Graham Greene had his comedies and his serious novels? I feel I've got my movies where the looks are all of it, and other movies where I'm a character actress," says the woman who delivered a blisteringly raw performance in the Oscar winner, Crash, but who has no compunction about telling me that her daughter Ripley has only ever seen Norbit, "which is this crass movie I did with Eddie Murphy".

Right now she's playing Condoleezza Rice for Oliver Stone's film, W. Is it daunting playing a living person? "No, because it's not the definitive piece of work, it's just what Oliver Stone needs to say at this point about the Bush administration. I feel films are a conversation in the media and the public, this is one word in a big conversation that needs to happen about this time in American politics."

Presumably this is a very critical take on the current administration? Slowing down for the first time during our conversation, she says: "He told me he wants to get light about it because it's too horrifying, it's too depressing. They're not his words, that is not a direct quote, please! I got the sense that he's laughing in a derisive way. Comedy very often can deliver a tough message, and it lingers. Stone is a profoundly intelligent man – electric with intelligence, fizzing, angry. He is such an exciting person to be around."

And if she couldn't act, what would she do for a living? "I'm writing fiction now, a movie script, and I love it." Oh dear! Doesn't that create problems with her husband? "Not at all, partly because I don't let him come near it, but also because I've been his script editor for years and years and years, and we work together a lot. I suddenly thought wait, I may as well put this to use." The result, so far, is a "small" comedy, in the tradition of her favourite indie films, such as Napoleon Dynamite. "I'd like to direct it and I am in the process of seeing if that's at all possible."

Something tells me it she'll make it possible. I'm left pondering her explanation for her eldest daughter's name (the younger is named after the beautiful and damned singer from The Velvet Underground). "My husband and I were watching Aliens. And the character is kicking ass and saving the world. She's incredibly powerful, but it doesn't compromise her femininity, the best part of it, the way you have grace, soft love in you, and the maternal instinct." Ripley, sure, but it also sounds a lot like Thandie Newton.

Making a difference

Volvic's 1L-for-10L initiative, in partnership with World Vision, launched this spring, with the goal of providing more than 6 billion litres of clean water to people living in Africa. For every litre of Volvic Natural Mineral Water or Volvic Touch of Fruit purchased in the UK over the next three years, Volvic and World Vision will provide ten litres of clean, safe drinking water through their well creation programme in six countries, including Ghana, Malawi, Zambia, Ethiopia, Niger and Mali.

• To find out how much water has been generated, and for further information on the programme and how you can help, visit www.volvic1for10.co.uk