Ruth Negga – ‘Imagine a Black Woman Just Wanting Something'

In Passing, Ruth Negga plays a character who dares you to disapprove of her choices.

- By Mallika Rao

IT’S A BRIGHT DAY in Los Angeles, and I’m sitting in a plush hotel lobby talking to the actress Ruth Negga about what it feels like to desire something you can’t have. At 40, she slots herself within a group of Black actresses who have perhaps had to “fight harder, wait longer, be more available” in order to clear a path for multidimensional roles. She feels she has sacrificed, missed weddings and funerals, put her personal life on hold. Then again, she counters, she still believes there’s “something exquisite” about longing— about not getting what you might think you want. She’s got an amused, faraway look in her eyes now, as if she has remembered an ancient joke about the nature of existence. “We do forget that, don’t we?” she says. “After a certain amount of money … you might become unfulfilled. Then you find yourself building penis-shaped rockets. And everyone, we’re looking at them going, So you’ve destroyed the earth and you’re having a big swinging mickey flash up in the fucking atmosphere. Great. Good for you. ”

Negga is a star you’d likely recognize as such by aura, if not by name. Her face, all eyes and angles, could command a silent film; in her selection of parts, she can seem to be a single-minded dramatic artist. Her turn in the 2016 biopic Loving as Mildred Loving—the Black American woman who became a somewhat accidental pioneer in the legal protection of interracial marriage— earned Negga, a relative newcomer to Hollywood, an Oscar nomination. Last year, she played Hamlet in a buzzy production staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn— an “emo dreamboat,” as one headline put it. Her latest project is