The one movie Thandiwe Newton wishes she could do over: “I was too young to know”
It’s rare you’ll find an actor who doesn’t have regrets about certain career choices, and Thandiwe Newton is no exception.
No matter what profession you’re in, that unshakeable feeling of regret has the power to throttle just about anyone and make you lose sleep over decisions you’ll never be able to change, as much as you’d love to.
Starting her career in the early 1990s, Newton has appeared in everything from the Oscar-winning Crash and the epic sci-fi blockbuster Solo: A Star Wars Story to the hit television series Westworld, careful not to box herself into a certain genre, and this has been the key to her success, even if she looks back on some projects and wishes she could redo them.
For instance, when Newton was young and trying to find her way in the industry, she landed a role in a historical drama that would prove controversial, and while she went into it with good intentions, she now realises that perhaps it would’ve been better if she’d stayed away from such a divisive film so early in her career.
Off the back of starring in movies like The Young Americans and Interview with the Vampire, she found herself thrust among big names like Nick Nolte, Vincent Cassel, and Gwyneth Paltrow when she signed up for Jefferson in Paris. Directed by James Ivory, who’d just been Oscar-nominated for his stunning drama The Remains of the Day, the film explored Thomas Jefferson’s personal relationships before he became president of the United States, which included his relationship with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings, played by Newton.
While Ivory was used to receiving acclaim for his work, for the first time, one of his movies was actually facing significant backlash. The portrayal of a dynamic between a slave and their master is never going to be easy to capture sensitively, especially with a white man at the helm, and critics thought that the film missed the mark.
When Newton looks back on the movie, she can recognise that perhaps she didn’t do enough research into the script before she accepted the part. It was one of her first roles as a Hollywood star, and it seems that she just didn’t know what she was getting herself into, telling The Times, “If I could go back, I would have loved to have played, or encouraged, the filmmakers to portray the darker side of Thomas Jefferson’s life with Sally Hemings, but I was too young to know. And I was so grateful for having been there.”
It can be easy to be blinded by the bright lights of Hollywood, and that seemed to be the case for the actor, who only realised after the fact that perhaps she should’ve considered the part more closely before taking it on. Luckily, the failure of the film didn’t hinder her career significantly, and by 2000, she had a major role in the highest-grossing movie of the year, Mission: Impossible 2.
The disaster that was Jefferson in Paris is all in the past now, although I’m sure that Newton would erase it from her filmography, given the chance.
