The role Thandiwe Newton only played out of spite: “Fuck you, I’m going to do this film”
She’s been Tom Cruise’s love interest in a Mission: Impossible movie, Condoleezza Rice in Oliver Stone’s W, the head of a simulated brothel in Westworld, a hormone monster in Big Mouth, and so much more.
Basically, Thandiwe Newton has done it all, and she usually does it pretty well.
The double Golden Globe nominee can also be found playing Dame Vaako in the sci-fi action romp The Chronicles of Riddick. The film, which Newton described as “camp as a row of tents” in an interview with The Telegraph, is the second instalment in the ‘Riddick’ series, which centres on Vin Diesel’s character of the same name.
Vaako is the wife of the Necromonger Commander (Karl Urban) tasked with destroying Riddick on the occupied planet of Helion Prime. She has greater ambitions for her husband than a military career, as her Lady Macbeth-like actions play a key role in the film’s climax.
This part was unlike anything else Newton had played up to this point in her career. Curious about why she was chosen, she went straight to the man in charge. “I remember [asking director] David Twohy about the role, and saying, I’m really intrigued, I’d never have cast myself in this, I admire your boldness,” she said in that same interview. “He said, ‘Oh, it wasn’t my idea, it was the head of the studio’. So I thought ‘Fuck you’, I’m going to do this film whether you like it or not”.
As the star continued, she explained that taking the role wasn’t about pissing off one snobby director, but about taking on an entire system. “I like being challenged and doing unexpected things, and I also love not being pigeonholed,” she said. “All I was hearing when I was starting out was that if you’re a Black actor in England, you play pimps or policemen”.
“Things have changed, and I’m really proud of that; I’m a champion for defying convention and challenging stereotypes.”
Thandiwe Newton
Newton’s race was very much a defining feature of her early roles. She played Yvette, a slave, in Interview with the Vampire, and appeared in the film Jefferson in Paris as Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman believed to have been impregnated several times by US Founding Father and President, Thomas Jefferson. The reason why she reverted back to the original spelling of her name was to reclaim her Zimbabwean heritage, after years of worrying it might adversely affect her career.
It seems like Newton’s trip to outer space did help in expanding her repertoire. Other big jobs over the next few years included a role in the ‘Best Picture’ winner Crash, playing a slimy mob accountant in Guy Ritchie’s Rocknrolla, and the daughter of Danny Glover’s US President in disaster movie 2012. Considering she was playing a president’s slave just over a decade earlier, that’s a remarkable turn of events.
Never one to back down from powerful people, Newton’s appearance in The Chronicles of Riddick is about way more than starring in a blockbuster. It’s symbolic of her struggle to be recognised as more than just a ‘Black’ actor and to blaze a trail for those who followed her, including her own daughter, the actor Nico Parker.
