"Can you imagine the bond between them?" Thandie Newton asks. "The trust?" She is talking about one of the most intimate, enigmatic partnerships in politics, between the president and the woman some have called his closest confidante, Condoleezza Rice. "She's the best teacher he ever had," says Newton, a keen student of Rice, having played her opposite Josh Brolin (as The Decider) in Oliver Stone's W. The biopic may have all the subtlety and restraint of, say, Nixon, but Newton adds poise to the proceedings. For nearly two decades the 35-year-old, Cambridge-educated Englishwoman has been classing up prestige pictures (Beloved), action flicks (Mission: Impossible II), and awards bait (Crash) with a beguiling mix of beauty and steely backbone.
"I'm not playing her in a purist way," Newton continues. "It's like a poem about her." For inspiration, she drew on the masquerading self-portraits of the photographer Cindy Sherman as well as the iron bearing of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. "It's like they went to the same finishing school," she marvels of Rice and Thatcher. "There's the dignity, the polish, the lifting up of the trousers as they sit down." Newton rises halfway from her seat, resettling with a prim pinch at her lap. "Josh used to laugh and laugh at the physical quirks."
We're having tea on a gray morning in Toronto. Newton is in town from London for the city's film festival, her first duty being to plug her other current project, RocknRolla, the latest London-gangster-chic amusement ride from Guy Ritchie. In it she plays perhaps the world's least dull accountant, a willowy swindler who coolly robs a Russian oligarch. "There's so much chaos and mess in the film," she says. "I wanted Stella to be emotionally disconnected and physically self-controlled." RocknRolla presents a gallery of tough guys — Gerard Butler, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Strong, and Idris Elba — but Newton more than holds her own. "Thandie is so brilliant," Butler says. "She didn't have an easy role, but she took an angle on it. She's an incredible actor and a great girl to have around. She got the rhythm of the movie right away."
Then again, maybe the men in RocknRolla weren't all that tough. "You look at these guys who are all covered in blood and destroying each other with golf clubs," she says, "and they're actually these sensitive, emotionally available actors. It's like hanging out with my girlfriends." She flashes her playful grin. Though she's suffering from a cold, a stuffed-up head hasn't put a damper on her earthy wit. "You know how a terrible cold coming on feels like a small goblin's ass on your face?" she says. "Well, now the ass has gone, and it's been replaced by mucus."
Newton's lighter side was put to good use in Roland Emmerich's upcoming sci-fi apocalypse circus, 2012. After her final day on the Louisiana set of W., she collected her two daughters (with husband Ol Parker, a writer and director) and made for Emmerich's Vancouver shoot. There, she walked into yet another Oval Office. "One week later, I was playing the president's daughter in a scene with Danny Glover. 'Daddy, what the hell is going on?!'" Newton smiles, then teasingly deadpans: "But we all deserve a bit of a break, I guess."
