“It wasn’t going well”: the movie Thandiwe Newton called a “nightmare” to work on
Having worked solidly in film and television since the early 1990s, Thandiwe Newton has played her part in projects hailing from all corners of the scale spectrum, but she’s never been particularly interested or enamoured with the world of blockbuster cinema.
It’s not that she’s avoided it entirely, but for the most part, her experiences haven’t been ones to remember. At the turn of the millennium, she was sought out to play one of the three leads in McG’s Charlie’s Angels, but she quickly ruled herself out of the running because she had no interest in being objectified.
Newton wasn’t required to do much more than stand around and deliver exposition in Vin Diesel’s space opera The Chronicles of Riddick, like the majority of cast members she was little more than window dressing standing in front of the chaos unfolding in Roland Emmerich’s 2012, and it would be an understatement to say she wasn’t thrilled after discovering she was getting killed off in Solo: A Star Wars Story.
The actor’s first taste of expensive action epics came on her second time working on a Tom Cruise picture, but Mission: Impossible II and Interview with the Vampire have absolutely nothing in common other than those two cast members. Playing the female lead opposite the biggest star in the business is a daunting prospect, matters that weren’t helped by Newton’s dissatisfaction with her role.
Not many performers would tell Cruise exactly how they felt, but Newton has always been celebrated for the strength of her convictions, and Mission: Impossible II was no different. “There was one time we were doing this scene with him and me on the balcony,” she told Vulture. “And I didn’t think it was a very well-written scene. I get angry with him. We’re frustrated with each other. It wasn’t going well.”
Cruise wasn’t happy with Newton’s work as Nyah Nordoff-Hall, which she put down to having “the shittiest lines,” with additional rehearsals having an adverse effect. She admitted repeating the scene “pushed me further into a place of terror and insecurity,” even calling up friend and director Jonathan Demme to relay the sequence of events to him that she described as “a nightmare”.
In her estimation, Cruise wanted “this alpha bitch”, and while Newton did the best she could with the material presented, she didn’t think being so one-dimensional was “the best way to get the best work out of someone.” Although she did point out the spy sequel’s figurehead wasn’t nasty or malicious, she nonetheless intimates that the stresses and pressures of Cruise being both the star and producer contributed greatly to the uncomfortable environment.
In the end, Newton carried on one of the Mission: Impossible saga’s earliest and longest-running traditions by playing the female lead in one of the instalments and then never appearing in any of the subsequent movies, not that she seemed to mind in the slightest.
