29 Nov “The first actresses were often compared to prostitutes and
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Canada Goose Outlet Mbatha Raw is one of Bafta’s Rising canada goose outlet Stars of 2015. You might recognise her from Amma Asante’s Belle (2013), in which she starred as Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate child of a Navy captain and a West Indian slave who was brought up in London society. Or you might know her as companion Martha Jones’s sister in Doctor Who (2007), or as Ophelia to Jude Law’s Hamlet in the West End in 2009, and later on Broadway. You might not know her at all but that’s about to change. Over the coming months we’ll see her in films opposite Will Smith, Keanu Reeves and Matthew McConaughey. Mbatha Raw’s star is rising. Canada Goose Outlet
buy canada goose jacket But first there’s canada goose coats on sale Nell Gwynn, a play written by her friend Jessica Swale. The two met on an open air production of As You Like It in Bristol 10 years ago. Mbatha Raw was playing Celia; Swale was assisting the director. “We Canada Goose Parka kept in touch over the years,” says Mbatha Raw. “I’ve done the odd play reading and workshop of her stuff.” She notes delightedly that Gwynn “had this close relationship with Aphra Behn, the [female] playwright of the time that’s like me and Jessica”. buy canada goose jacket
canada goose uk shop Swale has created what Mbatha Raw calls “a modern play in the style of the Restoration stage”. Is canada goose their Nell going to be a racy portrait? “You can’t do Nell Gwynn without acknowledging the bawdiness and the vivacity of that era,” she says. canada goose clearance sale “Under the Puritans, the theatres were closed, the canada goose clearance Globe was closed, there was no theatre canada goose store or dancing or anything joyful allowed for several years. Then everything came back with a bang, and Charles II garnered a reputation as this decadent king. canada goose black friday sale We’re definitely going to explore that in a cheeky way. But we were all very clear that we didn’t want it to be ‘Carry On Nell Gwynn’.” canada goose uk shop
cheap canada goose uk Gwynn was famously brought up in a brothel, although she denied having been a child prostitute. She was first noticed by Charles while working as a “flirty orange seller” at the King’s Theatre, before her stage career took off, then went on to become his mistress for 17 years and a fixture at court until his death in 1685. Aside from the mostly glowing mentions of her acting in Pepys’s diary, she comes to us vividly across the ages in portraits by Peter Lely and others, including several nudes. cheap canada goose uk
canada goose black friday sale I wonder if Mbatha Raw sees any parallels with the way actresses and pop stars are portrayed today. “As in ‘sex sells’? Historically, that’s always been an element of that in acting,” she says. erinpsalzer “The first actresses were often compared to prostitutes and sometimes they actually were. It’s fascinating to me; I did a film recently [Beyond the Lights] which explored the misogyny in the music industry, what women have to do, or think they have to do, to get attention, playing up your canada goose deals sexuality and all of that. It’s really interesting to go back to Nell Gwynn and realise that this is not remotely a new idea.” canada goose black friday sale
Canada Goose Parka I wonder which of the two characters she most identifies with the sassy, sexy Noni or the tightly laced Belle, for whom much of the emotion is below the canada goose coats surface. Belle, she says, she “completely relates to on every level”, but she notes: “Those characters share a lot. In many ways, a character like Noni has a more complex inner life, precisely because her armour is so sparkly. You forget that this person is deeply troubled because they’re shaking their booty in your face and have got lashings of make up and hair extensions.” Canada Goose Parka
canada goose coats on sale Telegraph film critic Robbie Collin described Beyond the Lights as “a wildly larger than life star is born story” with an “unexpected rawness to the romance”, noting that Mbatha Raw and her co star Nate Parker had “better chemistry” than any screen couple he had seen in the past year. Despite its growing number of admirers, however, the film went straight to DVD in Britain a fact that Mbatha Raw describes as “disappointing”, “frustrating” and “irritating” and the suspicion remains that this was down to unspoken racism about the fact that its leads were both non white. canada goose coats on sale
Canada Goose Jackets Race really wasn’t anything she thought about growing up in the sleepy middle class village of Witney in Oxfordshire, she says. Her parents separated when she was three and, being an only child, she was encouraged by her mother to join lots of after school clubs. “I identified more with being the theatre girl and the dancing girl and the girl that played the saxophone and sang in the choir, that was really my world.” It was the stage rather buy canada goose jacket than film or television that Canada Goose Jackets drew her to acting. “There was never a conscious choice. It was always Canada Goose sale theatre because it was the only thing that was tangibly accessible to me Canada Goose online growing up.” Her first role was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, aged 11. She auditioned for Rada at 17, and went there at 18. Ben Whishaw was in the year above; Tom Hiddleston and Andrea Riseborough in the year below. Canada Goose Jackets
cheap Canada Goose She has a supporting role in soon to be released legal drama The Whole Truth, which stars Keanu Reeves and Rene Zellweger, and she has also recently returned from a gruelling shoot in New Orleans with Matthew McConaughey, which she describes as “70 days shooting in swamps in a corset” for The Free State of Jones, which tells the true story of anti slavery Confederate deserters in Jones County, Mississippi during the American Civil War. McConaughey, she says, was formidably focused canadian goose jacket and in character most of the time. cheap Canada Goose
canada goose store After that, she says, she needed to come back home to “do some theatre, see some old friends, go to yoga, take a hike, do some normal things” buy canada goose jacket cheap to “refill that deep, deep well of emotion that is required for those more emotional roles”. The comic tone of Nell Gwynn will be a departure. Is it a risk for her? Her brow furrows. “Risk sounds so negative.” (This is very Mbatha Raw; she describes herself as “relentlessly optimistic” and it would be hard to disagree.) Is she funny, though? “The idea of stand up is my worst nightmare,” she says canada goose store.