With roles in Westworld and Solo: A Star Wars Story, the actor is at the top of her game. From navigating the industry as a black British woman, to ‘brainwashing’ - the journey there wasn’t always easy

Thandie Newton is, by her own admission, “having quite a good run at the moment”. Over the past 18 months, she has earned a Golden Globe nomination for her role as Maeve Millay, a robot madam in the HBO series Westworld, and a TV Bafta nomination for playing DCI Roz Huntley in the BBC One drama Line of Duty. On Thursday, she will be inducted into one of the biggest film franchises of them all, with the release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, in which she plays Val. She’ll probably get her own figurine. Not bad for a woman who admits that she wasn’t really into sci-fi and westerns, or even that keen on doing television.

“I just didn’t see television as being reflective of stories I was interested in,” she says. “But I wanted to be home more, and TV was changing, and my agent said: ‘If you want to work in British TV, this is it – Line of Duty.’”

Her desire to be home more is a major motivation, albeit one she is still struggling to fulfil. We meet, initially, in a hotel in Los Angeles, but so jet-lagged is Newton, off the back of appearances at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, that we agree to speak instead when she’s back home in north-west London. On the day we Skype – me from New York, her from her kitchen – it’s just a few weeks later, but she has already been across the Atlantic and back again, and is about to set off for Miami, LA again and then Cannes.

She has previously described her time in the police drama as “a career highlight”, but today seems unsure. “I have had a funny relationship with Line of Duty,” she says, as she fiddles with her necklace. “I am very proud of it, partly because it is so unlike me, so it was a real performance. But so many people stop me in the street and say: ‘Roz is such a bitch.’ It hurts me every time, because I felt real compassion for her.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thandie Newton as Detective Chief Inspector Roz Huntley in Line of Duty. Photograph: Bernard Walsh/World Productions/ BBC

Her character – who was even hailed by the show’s creators as their “most devious character ever” – went to extraordinary lengths, even committing murder, to secure a conviction in a case and protect her own position, in the fourth series of the show.

“I was distraught at some of her betrayals,” admits Newton. “But she is a person who has been so oppressed by her environment, by the sexism and harassment, which she uses in the end to try to liberate herself. She’s had to sacrifice so much in fighting her way to the top, and that can twist your psyche.”

She likens Huntley to Winnie Mandela: “Everything she went through when her husband was in prison – how she was tortured and abused – and the crimes that she then committed herself, reprehensible things. I think of Roz as a woman who has been similarly, psychically, devastated by oppression.

“Women can be the most dangerous allies to the patriarchal system,” she continues. “Because of what they have to deal with to get into positions of authority. And, just as a side note, I don’t believe that the patriarchal system has been built by men; it’s been built by fear. It’s not gendered.”

This is what talking to Thandie Newton is like: you start out having a seemingly straightforward discussion of a television drama, and in a few short minutes, you find yourself deep into social anthropology – in which she has a degree from Cambridge University – and existentialism.

Her role in Westworld is just as layered. Set in a western-themed adventure park, where wealthy guests can indulge their most visceral fantasies, robot “hosts”, including her character Maeve, are the victims of rape and violence, endlessly patched up and reprogrammed. The high-concept, big-budget drama spins complex narratives across multiple timelines, and poses questions about the nature of consciousness and the notion of free will, while its androids have gained sentience and gone rogue.

“The first season was all about empowerment, and the second, for Maeve, is about grief,” says Newton. The character is searching for her daughter, who may or may not be a figment of her imagination, a leftover fragment from a previous “script” of her android incarnation. “And she gives no fucks this season; she’s got nothing to lose, which is very powerful.”

Since its launch in the autumn of 2016, Westworld has felt terrifyingly prescient, raising uncomfortable ideas about technological manipulation long before most of us had heard of Cambridge Analytica. “The parallels were nuts,” Newton says, shaking her head.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Newton as Maeve Millay in Westworld. Photograph: HBO

But the result is some spectacular television. The episode due to air this week – on Sunday in the US, and Monday in the UK – belongs almost entirely to Newton, with strong themes of female solidarity and resistance, more pertinent than ever, given the wider context of the #MeToo movement. “It’s so beautiful, and it’s all such a metaphor for the used and abused in our world, who are treated like they are nothing,” says Newton.

Some have been shocked by the extent to which the culture of sexual abuse in Hollywood has been revealed since the movement began last October. Not Newton. “I’ve been talking about sexual harassment and rape in our industry for 20 years, and no one was ready to take it on,” she says, matter-of-factly. She told CNN five years ago that when she was 18 a Hollywood casting director asked her to sit with her legs apart while he filmed up her skirt, and directed her to touch herself and “think about the person I was supposed to be having the dialogue with, and how it felt to be made love to by this person”. Some years later, a producer boasted to the director Ol Parker, by then Newton’s husband, that he’d seen the video. The unnamed director would play it at parties.

In retrospect, is she angry that nobody listened to her about harassment? “I have been … frustrated,” she says, after a pause. “But what I realised is that they weren’t able to. We were in an industry built on favours, and it was an unspoken way of life: that you would need to communicate with co-stars, or with men of power, in a flirtatious way. Sex was, and is, the currency, and everyone’s complicit.”

But the penalty for saying that, as a young woman at the start of her career, was severe. “It affected my friendships, it affected my career; I was definitely less hireable.” She sighs, and rubs her eyes.

“I can’t bear how my whole identity gets tied up with it. It’s like I’m a trademark for sexual abuse. But it caused me a lot of pain, because I thought there was something wrong with me that I couldn’t stop.”

Much of Newton’s time is now spent campaigning on behalf of women in developing countries, with Eve Ensler’s V-Day charity. “And playing Maeve is one of the first times in my career that I feel like I’ve been able to actually reflect the harrowing truth of what people go through in the world,” she says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Newton with Nicole Kidman in Flirting. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext/Warner Bros

Born in London and raised in Penzance, Cornwall, by her Zimbabwean mother Nyasha and white British father, Nick, Newton made her film debut at 16 years old, acting alongside Nicole Kidman in Flirting. Although she has worked steadily ever since – in blockbusters such as Crash and Mission: Impossible II, as well as quirkier fare such as Run, Fatboy, Run and RocknRolla – the bulk of her jobs have been in the US.

“I love being here, but I can’t work, because I can’t do Downton Abbey, can’t be in Victoria, can’t be in Call the Midwife,” she once told the Sunday Times magazine of the paucity of opportunities for a person of mixed race in the British film and television industry.

“I went where the work was,” she shrugs today. But even some of that work she now views with a level of regret. “There are certain projects that I now look at as being too naive in terms of addressing and exploring the stories of African people in the United States.” Two projects early in her career post-Flirting – Interview With the Vampire and Jefferson in Paris – involved her playing slaves.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Newton with Matt Dillon in Crash.

Photograph: Allstar/LIONS GATE

“I was also coerced into doing some projects that I didn’t want to do,” she continues. “I feel a sense of gratitude now. [It made me] build a strength and a resolve. But it took a long time, because I was totally brainwashed.”

Her role in Solo – filmed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey – represents a major milestone. While recent instalments have been more inclusive, featuring non-white actors such as John Boyega and Riz Ahmed, we have not yet seen a woman of colour in a leading role. “Even Lupita Nyong’o’s character was CGI,” points out Newton.

“I am the first dark-skinned woman in a lead role in the Star Wars legacy, which is both great, that it is finally a correction, and awful, that it’s taken this long.”

So Newton is indisputably at the top of her game. And now she wants to play it by her own rules. “I don’t feel like I’m an actress for hire any more, in the way that I used to be. I am not a person for hire.” She has two film scripts of her own in development, and plans to direct both herself.

One story is set in the US, one in the UK (much of which she wrote on the set of Solo), and both, she says, are “very personal human stories. I really want to get to the fucking core of why we do what we do. I certainly don’t think that I know, but I love stories that are really trying to find out.”

Both, she says, will feature female protagonists. “I am obsessed with the female experience. I don’t actually think I could write as a man,” Newton says. “And that is everything we have in cinema; that is how our identities have been fed back to us – from a male perspective.”

I mention the steadily growing number of other A-list British female actors who are now writing, producing or directing, including Emily Mortimer, Gemma Arterton and Emma Thompson, and we conclude that this would not be a conversation we could have had 20, or even 10, years ago.

“What’s happened?” Newton asks, with a wicked glint in her eye. “We’ve all short-circuited, and now we’re going rogue.”

Westworld continues Mondays, 9pm, Sky Atlantic; Solo: A Star Wars Story is in cinemas from 24 May