InPassing,Ruth Negga plays a character who dares you to disapprove of her choices.
Passingis in theaters and on Netflix November 10.
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She feels she has sacrificed, missed weddings and funerals, put her personal life on hold.
We do forget that, dont we?
After a certain amount of money … you might become unfulfilled.
Then you find yourself building penis-shaped rockets.
Negga is a star youd likely recognize as such by aura, if not by name.
Yet theres mischief and inquisitiveness, a hint of screwball timing, evident in all her performances.
When we meet, Negga says she is in the middle of watching a spate of decidedly light fare.
She would love to do comedy someday.
But Ive got such a tragic face, she says.
I do all the tragedies.
Clare is, in a sense, the ultimate cool girl.
Itll be fun, for her useful, for her.
Clares ruse recalls classic American hustles.
Hardly a fool, she nonetheless fulfills the function of the archetypal clown.
Look at the jester in Shakespeare.
Getting into that characters mind-set posed a series of tantalizingly maddening riddles.
Is she the cat that got the cream?
Is that what she really wants?
Because in many ways, if she does just want superficial things, I think shes probably more threatening.
She doesnt want access to the white world to save the world.
She just wants it because she wants it.
Imagine a Black woman just wanting something because they want something and thats it.
Her selfhood, she says, often seems to confuse those who demand knowability from a person.
Growing up, she felt judgment thrown her way not only for her Ethiopian otherness but for her Irishness.
She met antagonism with antagonism.
I was a bit of a goth, she says.
Negga came across the novelPassingaround then, as an adolescent.
In the course of her self-education, she was introduced to the concept of passing.
Then there was the sheer ordinariness of the compulsion.
After all, didnt Negga shift her accent when in the company of posher Brits?
Didnt everyone hide themselves in some way?
The actress is no longer a teen given license to try on identities.
She feels less sure of herself in some ways now except when shes on the stage or screen.
Critics have often commented on Neggas command of physical presence.
She loves words, she says, but the bodys ability to express meaning can feel infinite in scope.
Id sooner see a dance production than a play, she explains.
Theres something really elemental about it.
Im interested in what happens when we bypass the intellectualization of art.
When Hall first approached Negga for the film, it was for the part of Irene.
Negga had come off a series of contained, stoical roles, as Hall told me.
In the role, she looks up and through her lashes, almost cartoonishly built to provoke.
People who love living, they like a reaction.Passingis a tragedy.
But she refuses to make herself tragic.
She resists the trope of the tragic mulatto.
She thinks tragedy is for losers.
The inversion draws the women to each other.
I can do that, she says.
Its this idea hugely mistaken that we are all on the same playing field.
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