Zawe Ashton is dissecting the dreaded “self-tape”, where an actor must record themselves auditioning at home. “It’s when a loved one begrudgingly sits off-camera reading these awful lines while you’re dressed from the waist up in some kind of character outfit, with pyjama bottoms or no knickers on,” she smiles. “It’s basically like being an unpaid newsreader.”
It’s a sunny morning in London and Ashton, 34, has recently returned to the city she left last year for a three-month run of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in the West End alongside Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox. Wearing a rainbow jumper and ordering an avocado smoothie, she’s radiant, with a hiking-in-the- Hollywood-hills glow.
“I’m not living in LA,” she clarifies. “I live in Margate!” Turns out I’m not the first person to make this assumption. “Everyone thinks I live in LA. It’s brilliant. Don’t tell anyone I don’t. That’s a great way of getting out of doing things. ‘I’m sorry guys, I’m in LA’.”
Crossing the Thames recently with her Betrayal castmates – Londoners all – they felt the hometown love. “All three of us had this moment – rehearsing a play that is so based in London and being immersed in Pinter’s poetry, which he uses to describe the ins and outs of this city…”
But Hackney-born Ashton – best known for Channel 4 comedy dramas Fresh Meat (2011-2016), Not Safe for Work (2015) and last year’s BBC1 drama Wanderlust – did spend the majority of last year in Hollywood, thanks to a lead role in Netflix’s stylish, satirical art-world horror Velvet Buzzsaw, alongside Jake Gyllenhaal, Toni Collette and Rene Russo.
What’s more, the artist formerly known as drug-guzzling life-of-the-party Vod in Fresh Meat won over the film’s writer-director, Dan Gilroy (whose impressive debut was Nightcrawler in 2014), with – you guessed it – a self-tape.
Having lost her grandfather in the run-up to Christmas in 2017, Ashton was grieving and had just spent a night in A&E after accidentally cutting off the top of her finger, slicing bread. In the scene she recorded for Gilroy, she’s on the phone, “and I’ve got this huge bandage on my finger; it’s so big,” picking up a large salt shaker from our table to emphasise the size. “When I watched the tape back, I thought, ‘You look tired, you look puffy, you look insane.’”
Tired, puffy and insane was exactly what Gilroy had in mind for the character of Josephina, a deceptive and greedy gallery assistant. Ashton was on holiday in Malaga when she got the call. “I was, like, ‘I’ve drunk most of the wine in Malaga, I’ve eaten most of the tapas – I need to become a movie star in 48 hours. If poss!’
“There were a lot of famous women who wanted that role and probably should have played it,” says Ashton with a shrug. “But Dan was the guiding light through it all. And Rene [Russo, Gilroy’s wife] is the same. They’ve basically taken me in. I’m writing up adoption papers as we speak.”
Ashton is magnetic company; gregarious and funny, but intense and thoughtful. You can almost see her brain at work as she scrambles over sentences, searching for the right adjectives, repeating and emphasising words. Her command of language comes as no surprise; she is as much a writer as a performer. Her first play, Harm’s Way, premiered as part of the National Youth Theatre new writing season in 2008, and her first short film, Happy Toys, was nominated for Best UK Short at the Raindance Film Festival in 2014. Her first book, Character Breakdown – “A work of fiction. But mostly fact” – will be published next month.
Watching her rummage through a large tote for her phone to show me a photo (“the theatre turns you into a bag lady, you need your snacks; you need your comfy shoes”) I contemplate if any other actor could say: “The nuts and bolts of how people speak really turns me on,” and still be taken seriously.
Ashton admits she came very close to packing it all in before that audition brought her back from the brink. “I’d got to a point where I wondered if acting was basically the worst medicine I should be taking for all of the symptoms I was experiencing in life,” she explains. “It’s like going to a doctor and them saying, ‘What I think you should do is: be extremely aware of your face and body, move around constantly, have no fixed abode, and get lots of strangers to profess that they love you or hate you simultaneously. Oh, and take tablets – one is anxiety, one is dysmorphia, the other is self-flagellation,’” she breaks off, laughing but serious. “Who would write a prescription for acting?”
In truth, it was her grandfather’s death that gave her the most food for thought. “There is something about seeing someone who has lived for almost 100 years scrolling through the memories of their life. You think there’s going to be a whole slideshow of stuff, but actually there are only four or five things that replay,” she pauses to take a breath. “My grandad talked a lot about the decisions he’d made; the moments where you truly go about being the agent of change and revolution in your life. Tiny moments, where you were present enough to have a deep connection with someone, even if it was fleeting. Those are the things that stay with you. I’ve been acting for such a long time, since I was a child, and I was like, ‘I need to make space really and truly for those things.’”
Ashton has produced some creatively experimental work aside from acting in recent years, from presenting late-night Channel 4 arts programme Random Acts and guest-editing BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour to directing a short film about the New York artist Lorraine O’Grady for Tate Modern. “It was definitely a ‘fuck it’ moment. I’d done a pilot for Amazon and I was on hold for over a year (not allowed to do other acting work). The series didn’t happen, but it was such a formative year because I experimented and reaffirmed myself: ‘You are someone who does things a lot of the time because of passion, and that might mean that you’re not as wealthy as other people.’”
It’s something she’s thought about a lot. “When you’re an actor, wealth is about choice,” she says. “I hate talking about class, but the truth is as an actor you’re only going to be doing some really great work if you can afford to be out of work and take the good stuff. If you can’t, you’re going to be treading quite a different path.”
The eldest child of an English father and Ugandan mother – both teachers – Ashton was brought up in Hackney and attended the Anna Scher Theatre (whose famous alumni include Kathy Burke and Daniel Kaluuya) from the age of six until she was 19. She has been on telly since she was 11 (starting out in the BBC’s Game On and The Demon Headmaster); quite a slog until her big break in Fresh Meat, at 27. “I have to check in a lot of the time with who that person was,” she confesses. “That level of discipline, that level of engagement, that level of passion…”
While she thrived creatively at Anna Scher and academically at school, on a personal level, teenage Ashton was floundering, and she was forced to switch secondary schools, moving from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) in Islington to one in Parliament Hill. “I was getting bullied so badly,” she explains. “I had some major close calls in the playground.”
Michelle Obama visited the school in 2009 and even mentioned it in her recent memoir, Becoming. “I know!” shrieks Ashton – a huge fan of the former First Lady. “I couldn’t believe it. When I saw Michelle Obama at Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, I was like, ‘Where were you, Michelle, when I needed you?’ I was smacked between the eyes. I think anyone who has been bullied finds it life-affirming if you live to tell the tale,” she continues. “I just wish someone told me at school that there’s this weird average whereby if you’re not popular at school you will become popular later.”
Ashton talks at length about the responsibility she feels towards women and particularly to women of colour. It’s something she’s carried around with her since the age of six when she first became aware of the male gaze, but didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss it. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t feel such a deep responsibility,” she sighs. She wouldn’t want to be the face of the empowerment of women, or women of colour. “I’d like one of the cisgender Caucasian males to step up and be that face,” she says. “I feel like I’m answering on behalf of them and they somehow get to remain blameless and free of public responsibility.”
While the Time’s Up movement is making tangible improvements to the industry, Ashton has other concerns. “Do I worry that #Me Too has a faddish element? Yes I do, but I worry about everything. As women we’ve been so oppressed, so marginalised; so historically shat on that, undoubtedly, part of that misogyny is internalised. Cognitively, I know I have a misogynist within myself because that’s the voice that talks to me when I don’t feel good about myself.”
I ask her about a play she wrote 10 years ago, For All the Women Who Thought They Were Mad, about mental health in the black community and the overmedication of black women, with psychiatric drugs. Tonight, she has a meeting with Hackney Showroom, which is producing it and is aiming for a June opening. The issues are as close to her heart today as when she wrote it at 24. “It’s essentially about people not believing in black women’s pain and letting them die. Or not caring enough to treat them properly. We live in a capitalist society and if we’re talking about the people at the bottom of the food chain, it’s women of colour.”
I think back to what she said about wealth and doing the work she’s meant for, rather than what she thinks she should be doing. “It’s one of the treasures I’ll have with me at all times,” she nods. “That’s the great thing about being a writer. Once you’ve written it, you’ve got it. It’s there, it’s undeniable, and it’s the reason why everyone turns up.”
“Writers are so deeply disrespected sometimes, certainly it’s the case when you do film or television. It’s like: ‘We’ll just change that line’ – what were they thinking?” Not that anyone would dare with Pinter, whose words, she says, she’s currently having a “love affair” with. “I became obsessed with Pinter at drama school. There aren’t so many contemporary playwrights from Hackney – I always feel an affinity with anyone from Hackney.”
Before Ashton heads to rehearsals, she recalls a review of the first series of Fresh Meat in 2011 that riled her. Not because it was bad, but it said: “Where has Zawe Ashton been hiding?” “It made me feel deeply tired but deeply energised at the same time,” she recalls. “It does take a lifetime to become a ‘newcomer’. I’ve been hiding in plain sight, mate.”
Zawe Ashton stars in Betrayal with Tom Hiddleston and Charlie Cox at the Harold Pinter Theatre until 1 June, pinteratthepinter.com. Velvet Buzzsaw is on Netflix now
Fashion editor Jo Jones; hair and makeup by Kim Kiefer at Frank Agency using Kevyn Aucoin and Dr Haushka; fashion assistant Penny Chan; photographer’s assistant James Parker
