Her latest role as a vulnerable immigrant may remind Ruth Negga of her foreign ties, but that’s where the similarity ends for the Irish actor with ‘blind ambition’
RUTH NEGGA is back home. She's in Dublin to promote her latest film, Trafficked, the story of an illegal immigrant who is brought to Ireland with dreams of freedom only to find herself caught in a prison of prostitution, hunted down by the men who brought her here.
For Negga, playing such a role was an eye-opener. “I really wasn’t aware of how much of a business it is, a business with accountants and people on a payroll making huge vast sums of money by exploiting really, really vulnerable people,” she says. “It’s a slave trade.”
Though Negga knows something about the immigrant experience, she arrived here under very different circumstances, having been born to an Irish mother and Ethiopian father in Addis Ababa. She moved to Ireland when she was four, and even though the family moved back and forth to England after the death of her father, she still regards Ireland as home.
“I never identified with England, ever, not once. It’s not that I hated England, I just missed Ireland. All my family were here, my folks were here. England was very alien to me and I missed home.”
It's hard to reconcile her reminiscences of growing up with a gaggle of cousins in Limerick with the soft English accent coming from this poised and luminous woman who has graced the boards at the Royal Court and the National Theatre in London, earning herself an Olivier award in the process. Negga has acted alongside Dame Helen Mirren, starred in Neil Jordan's screen adaptation of Patrick McCabe's Breakfast at Pluto, and was chosen as Ireland's Shooting Star at the 2006 Berlin Festival.
However, despite the fact roles keep coming her way, Negga is all too aware of how difficult it can be to make it in the acting business. “I know a lot of very, very talented actors who just never get a break, and ones that are mediocre who seem to work all the time, so it’s not terribly fair.”
Despite this, Negga never had any hesitation about her choice of career. “There was never any doubt in my mind, ever, that I would do this,” she says. “It was presumptuous but it wasn’t arrogant, it was . . . a naivety. Because I didn’t realise ‘Ruth you actually have to get into drama school, you have to get an agent, you have to audition, hopefully someone will give you a job.’ It never occurred to me, I just though ‘I really want to do that.’ Blind ambition, in a really kind of naive way.”
She's the first to admit, however, that it was Hollywood blockbusters that seduced her as a young girl in Limerick, name checking The Bodyguard, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and Big Business.
On the original source of her fascination with the acting profession, Negga says: "It wasn't seeing Gielgud on stage in Hamlet, it was seeing Dolly Parton in Nine to Five! I liked the energy of it, and I liked the world that was created."
After school, Negga returned to Dublin to study acting in Trinity College. She recalls that starting out in the acting profession as someone of mixed race was easier in Ireland, where she avoided being pigeon-holed. “Multiculturalism in Ireland – in terms of colour especially – is relatively new, so I think that when you’ve not experienced something before, it’s unknown, you’ve got no markers,” she says.
"In England, they were less likely to see me for Abigail in The Crucible, probably I think because of my mixed races, and also because it's bigger, London's bigger, there's more competition." Nor was her mixed race a problem growing up in Limerick. "I think I was more an object of fascination in Limerick in the 1980s," she says, adding she never experienced that as a negative thing. "I know that sounds funny and rose-tinted glasses and whatever, but I actually didn't. Never."
FOR NEGGA, IRELAND has always been a place of support, both in Limerick and in theatre circles when she first began to act. She only left, she says, when she made the decision to do more television and film, seeing England as a place with more options.
Since moving, she's made a name for herself on the English stage, as well as appearing in television dramas including the recent BBC dramatisation of the lives of the five young women murdered in Ipswich in 2006, Five Daughters.
So what’s the career plan now? “Longevity, that’s the number one word, but longevity not in terms of the maid, or ‘Girl at bar, number four’, that kind of thing. I have ambition.”
She looks to the likes of Meryl Streep, Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp for inspiration as actors who have continued to find good roles through the years in an industry famed for its worship of youth.
Right now, however, Negga has youth on her side, as well as an almost breathtaking beauty and critical acclaim, none of which, refreshingly, appear to have gone to her head. “I will forever see myself as a 13-year-old with a monobrow, bad teeth, and slightly rotund.”
