Thandie Newton travels the arc between humanity and AI as she plays Maeve Millay in Jonathan Nolan’s Westworld
Thandie Newton is an English actress, who has appeared in numerous British and American films. Her most popular outings have been Mission Impossible 2, The Pursuit of Happyness, Crash, 2012, Rock n Rolla, Interview with the Vampire and Norbit. She won the BAFTA Award for her role in Crash.
What attracted you to WestworldIJ
The first time I met Jonathan [Nolan] and lisa [Joy], I was intrigued because Jonathan [Nolan] was brilliant in Inception and Memento, and lisa is a kickass woman at the very top of the industry.
But when I read the pilot, I refused because of the situations of sexual violence. Though I knew that with these two, there had to be a purpose behind it. Then I got the context.
There are tweaks, because it is in the future. We’ve got these robots. Just by the fact that they are programmed to satisfy humans, they become experts in human behaviour.
Have you always been a fan of sci-fi and Westerns as genresIJ
I never thought I was a sci-fan. But then Jonathan and lisa asked me if I had seen any Sergio leoni films…So there I was, watching Once Upon A Time in the West, and it was absolutely exquisite.
It was a great lesson about my own intolerance, and it was a lovely step into Westworld because the show is a lot about questioning the nature of our reality.
In the first two episodes, your character goes through a lot as do many of the characters. How did you prepare yourself for such a full-on role and show, that doesn’t shy away from issues of sex and violenceIJ
As I told you when I read the pilot script, there was so much that I was horrified by the violence, the depravity. And it seemed at odds with what I know Jonathan and lisa want to put out into the world. And me, playing a prostitute!
But the whole point of it is to shock us into the awareness that this is what we do to each other. You have to establish the depravity, show the extreme of what we can do to each other. This is violence between humans and robots, who can just get re-programmed, patched up and turned off. But real people can’t get re-programmed, patched up and turned off.
Once you’d spoken to Jonathan and lisa about where the story would land, after the initial set-up, did you feel more comfortable about the contentIJ
I split my life between my human rights work and trying to end violence against women. That’s what I do in my spare time, but that’s my absolute passion, focus, and I have to do it as a mother, wife, woman and an anthropologist.
With Westworld though, every day I went to work, I was satisfying my human rights activism, my ending violence against women activism, just through the words I was saying, the scenes I was playing — and I haven’t had that before. That was why I was so excited.
I understand that you weren’t told the full arc of your story at the beginning, which is obviously very different to making a film — how did you find thatIJ
Yes, I had no idea what was going to be happening episode to episode — they didn’t give us all the scripts at once.
We shot the pilot and then a year later we came back to shoot the show. We had a lot of time to talk through the arc of where everything was going to go. It was great that we had time to, because it was really important to get everything right.With Westworld it’s incredibly important that everything’s really concrete.
We had to think about the audience and the fact that they need the starting point ingrained in them because they’re going to need a place to go back to. So there was a lot of discussion. We were all learning a new philosophy for life.
How did you approach playing a robot, who is supposed to be incredibly human-likeIJ
I wondered how much movement, how little movement, how much emotion, how little emotion, I would need to use. I didn’t even know if I was maybe going to have to be slightly robotic.
You have a very dramatic episode two, in which you are very naked for quite a lot of the time. Did you have any reservations about thatIJ
I am naked almost all the time in the show but I watch it and I am completely calm about it, because they don’t zoom in on bits and pieces, and it is not titillating in the slightest.
I have been in shows in which I wear clothes and I feel more exposed, more exploited, as a woman. I’ve refused to take my shirt off before in shows. In this show, in order to comment on it, you need to see it.
You did a TED talk a few years ago on the topic of Embracing Otherness. Would you like to do more of themIJ
Well, I want to write a workshop on race for school children, because I think it could really change generations. I want to set out the idea that race is completely spurious, it was created during colonialism, and we’ve got to get rid of colonial labels.
I’ve written an essay on it but it has not been the right time to put it out. It’s a process because we have to go through empowering blackness in order to let it go.
Westworld airs in India Monday-Friday, 10 PM on Star World and Star World HD