The Underground Railroad Star Thuso Mbedu and Charlize Theron On Growing Up in South Africa, Knowing Their Worth on Set, and the Power of Difficult Conversations

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In The Underground Railroad, filmmaker Barry Jenkins’s sweeping adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2016 novel, Thuso Mbedu plays Cora, a woman chasing her freedom from slavery by way of an actual train route through Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Indiana. Throughout that long and dangerous journey, Cora is tailed not only by her traumas (including the disappearance of her mother, Mabel, when she was an infant), but also by the slave-catcher Arnold Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) and Homer (Chase Dillon), his Black child assistant. As a piece, The Underground Railroad is a stunning achievement, presenting a vision of America as deeply tortured as it is arresting; and Mbedu—already a star in her native South Africa—is a revelation, her characterization of Cora layered with despair, longing, detachment, and righteous anger.

For the actress, taking the role wasn’t about looking backwards, but knocking at the very foundation of the American experiment. “Yes, we were shooting this in 2019 going into 2020, and we were shooting a story set in the 1800s, but Black people are still being killed on the streets daily,” Mbedu reflected over Zoom one recent afternoon. Joining her on the call was the actress Charlize Theron, who, although also born and raised in South Africa, started acting only after she’d left.

Brought together to compare their backgrounds and discuss The Underground Railroad, the two stars—both now based in Los Angeles—covered a lot of ground; from the merits of chosen families to the global problem of gender-based violence and their shared obsession with Viola Davis. Read an edited version of their conversation below.

Note: Some spoilers for The Underground Railroad ahead.

Thuso Mbedu: I don’t want to fangirl, but I’m very excited to be talking to you.

Charlize Theron: Oh my gosh, you just took the words out of my mouth. I’m so in awe of the work that you have done. There’s this emerging South African talent coming forth right now, and I’m just really proud and really impressed. You guys are stepping in and setting that bar.

I keep telling my peers, Guys, I hope that you are ready for when they come knocking. Like, make sure that you’re prepared when the opportunity arises. You don’t want to only prepare for it when the opportunity is there. So I’m excited.

Well, let’s just start from the beginning. You’re from Pietermaritzburg, right?

Yes, I was born there and raised by my grandmother. When it came to studying and tertiary, there was no [film] industry at the time—the KwaZulu-Natal Film Commission was only started in 2010, which was my first year of university. But I knew that Johannesburg would be the stepping stone to the rest of the world, so I applied to Wits University.

That’s so incredible. And your grandmother is still in KwaZulu-Natal?

No. She passed away in 2014, literally three days before my first TV debut.

Oh my God. I didn’t grow up with grandparents, unfortunately, and I really mean unfortunately, because I see the relationship that my daughters now have with my mom. I’ve made it my mission to always, always talk about the importance of my mother in raising my two girls. I think it’s a relationship that no other person can fill, and I think if you’re lucky enough to have that in your life, you’re a very, very rich person. I’m so sorry that she left so soon. So do you have any family in KwaZulu-Natal?

In my nuclear family, it’s just my sister and I that’s left. She has a daughter, and then we have cousins, but it’s a few. We didn’t have a relationship with our father’s side of the family, but an entire generation passed away while we were still young—even our grandparents from that side have passed away—and then from the maternal side, my grandmother had seven children and only two are surviving now. So we try to keep in contact as much as we can, but as the years go by, it’s getting smaller and smaller.

I can relate to that—I only have me and my mom, but I feel like I have a large family of people that I’ve chosen to be my family. Some of them have been in my life for 30 years. I’m sure you’ve kind of gradually figured out who those people are in your life, right?

It’s only been in the last five to seven years that I’ve actually allowed myself to open up and receive people as family. For the longest time, my [thinking] was, if I allow myself to open up to people and I get attached to them, that means I will be in pain when they’re taken from me. Because of all the losses I’ve suffered, I’m just like, people die, you know? But now I know that I don’t have to live that way. And I think that that did inform the character Cora in The Underground Railroad, where she’s just like, Nope! Keep everyone at a distance. But where she is when we meet her and where I am now are at different places. I’m grateful for the people who are in my life now.

Barry Jenkins and Thuso Mbedu on the set of The Underground Railroad.

The Underground Railroad

Barry Jenkins and Thuso Mbedu on the set of The Underground Railroad.
Photo: Atsushi Nishijima

I have to say, there was something about your show that was, of course, riveting, shocking, infuriating, and it got every single emotion out of me, but at the same time, it felt like a warm blanket. In a way, I could feel the energy of how this thing came together. It made me feel hopeful, really, really hopeful. Did you feel a sense of hope making it, as well? That you were telling a story and showing a history that we all have to be able to face?

Going into the project, I realized that there was a lot that I didn’t know, so in building the story and developing it I read the book countless times that Mr. Whitehead had written, and then Barry had sent me a lot of material to consume as well. I felt like this is an opportunity for people to learn, because we think we know until we realize that we really don’t. When I had a couple of friends come to view the premiere with me, two of them are from South Africa, but they’ve been in the U.S. for over 10 years, and one of the first things they said after watching the very first episode was, “I didn’t know. I did not know. I’ve been living in this country for so long, but I did not know that this is what the Black body went through on this land.” So now they’re also actively trying to educate themselves all the more, which for me is something that I’m really grateful for. The hope is that because now we all understand what the foundations were, there is no way that we could go backward. We can only get better from here.

I was literally like, I want this to be part of a curriculum in school. But I think one of the spots that really emotionally destroyed me was when you guys are on Valentine Farm, and you see what happens when people are given the right to perform at their highest level—and not even that, because everything was negotiated and monitored—but you see the beauty that was created on that farm. To then see the massacre, and how it was destroyed, reminded me so much of a lot of the Black-owned businesses that were destroyed just in the last year. I don’t want to make direct comparisons, but it is hard to not look at that and say, “It’s been 400 years. Why are we still bumping our heads against the same wall here?” So how do you think, aside from creating content like this, do we prevent complacency from slipping back in?

We definitely need to not shy away from the conversation. I’ve seen it with people being active here in the U.S., where it’s like, yes, we’re having conversations in our pockets, but they’re now actually turning those conversations into policies which will change the system, because it is a system that is at play here when we are opposing oppression or different types of injustices. We’re not opposing people, we’re opposing systems. And by having those conversations, people who think that we’re opposing them will come to realize that this isn’t a personal matter. It only gets personal because you’re killing people as a result. So how do we change the system so that it’s a fair and just system for all? It’s about not shying away from the conversations. Don’t start feeling awkward when the conversation happens, because I can’t afford to have people feeling awkward and then pretending that this issue isn’t here, because that is my life, you know?

Not having it is not saving lives.

Right. Barry has been asked time and time again, because people talk about Black “trauma porn,” like, Why are we still watching slave narratives in 2021? Do we not have any other stories to tell? You know, all of that. And his basic answer is that we would be doing a great injustice to our ancestors by just wiping their story off and pretending it didn’t happen, because the narratives that have been shared, as with the history books, have been given from a particular standpoint. Now, for the first time, Black people can take ownership of the narrative and tell the story of what actually happened. And Barry did a great job of how he told the story: When we see brutality on screen, that’s not for the sake of it. It’s not to sensationalize it or get a reaction. It really is a case of, I’m telling the story of this woman who falls in love, who suffers pain, and it just so happens that she is brutalized in the process. There is a bigger story at play.

<h1 class="title">The Underground Railroad</h1><cite class="credit">Photo: Kyle Kaplan</cite>

The Underground Railroad

Photo: Kyle Kaplan

I’ve also been really emotionally affected by what’s been happening to young women and girls, especially in our country, South Africa. Gender-based violence against women and girls has really become an issue, and COVID-19 hasn’t helped; domestic violence is skyrocketing. I was watching you, knowing that you’ve come from KwaZulu-Natal, which is an area that my foundation, Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, works in with partners that we are so honored to be working with. As a society, we are still not having the conversation about how young girls are not valued at all by our leaders, or within our communities. Do you have anything that you might want to add to that? What can we do?

We’re constantly talking about how girls should behave to avoid being brutalized, being abused, but we’ve done this over so many years and it’s clearly not working. So what is the alternative plan? As much as girls are being taught and educated to be a particular way, who is teaching the men to do better? We’ve been crying out to the government to help us, and it’s like, Oh, we’ll have a national day of silence. But what are you actually doing? And you see people try to come up with programs to make a difference, but they don’t get the support. So you think, okay, what can I do? What can I actively do, apart from lending my voice? And I don’t know. I really, really don’t know.

But as you were saying earlier, you can’t avoid the difficult conversations. Maybe you won’t always have the answer, but the fact that we’re talking about it right now in Vogue, and somebody might read about it, is a reminder that it is happening, and to not forget. I don’t know about you, but in South Africa, not only did I obviously not learn about slavery in America, but I didn’t learn the truth about what was happening in my country. When it comes to young minds knowing the truth to make up their own minds, there’s been a real disconnect.

A huge disconnect. Because again, even with the history books, growing up in KwaZulu-Natal, you’ll touch on apartheid, but our curriculum is part of the British system, so we learn more about what happens in Europe than what happens in South Africa. But we are still living the consequences of that system, to the point where now, in our [film] industry back home, certain stories aren’t being commissioned because we can’t empower the Black body. Oh, God forbid the Black body is empowered and they start thinking for themselves, we’ll be in trouble. That’s the reality of it. Like one of my directors, Amanda Lane, who did Is’Thunzi, she had to fight because she was told there was no way that a show can be led by four girls and be a success. She had to fight to get that show on. And then when it was eventually commissioned, it was the best-performing show in the whole country.

I’ve been in this industry for almost 30 years, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that conversation. It’s not economically viable to make them, they just don’t do so well, audiences aren’t ready. Geena Davis did an incredible documentary [This Changes Everything] where she basically created an institution because people kept saying the same thing to her. She kept asking, where did you get this information? And nobody had an answer for that, so she created an institution that did the research, and it was all bullshit—female leads were incredibly economically viable. And so we’ve just been fed the same story that wasn’t even true. I have a question for you about the industry. When I left South Africa, I didn’t think that I was going to be an actor, so I never tried there. Is the film industry similar to in the U.S.?

My team constantly tells me that the experience that I had with Amazon is not a guarantee—like, this was an exception—so I’ve got two very different experiences. In South Africa, technically we have the resources, we have the talent now in terms of cast and crew, we’ve got locations; hence why people fly from all over the world to come shoot in South Africa. And something that I recently heard is that when different production houses go to Kenya or another part of Africa, it’s more expensive for them because they have to bring in their own equipment, while in South Africa they just bring a DOP and a director because we have everything that they have here. But it’s greed, mostly. People are looking out for themselves. Exploitation is [rampant]. The one thing that I always say to my team is that I could easily go back and shoot at home, but I wouldn’t be comfortable because now I know my worth. If it’s a script that I love, I will do it for free if I have to, but because I know that the funds are there and it’s a collaboration, pay me my worth. However, I know for a fact that paying me my worth means the crew and everyone else will suffer the consequences thereof, because [companies] will probably take that from the cost of the crew before they use the actual funds allocated to the project. I’ve had instances where I’ve spoken out, and my agent has gone, “Don’t fight this fight. Leave it alone. This is the nature of the industry.”

My thing is, let me put in the time and the work here—I don’t mind working hard—so that by the time I go back home, I have a voice big enough to make a difference. I might not be actively performing in the shows, but I can be producing stuff that will uplift people, because I feel that they’re so shortsighted. When I came [to the U.S.], I felt like my voice mattered. I could say something and I wouldn’t be shut down. I was blown away by how supportive every person was in every department, at every single step. Back home, I was the type where I would comb through my contract just to make sure that I’m protected, and I had other cast members who had been screwed over who would ask me to comb through their contracts so that they understood and knew their rights.

Well, listen, I could talk to you forever. Are you in L.A.?

I am.

I’m going to be calling you up, and when things open up a little bit more and we feel safe, I want to have a coffee or a tea or dessert and talk to you. I bet you’re busy as hell. You should be busy as hell.

We’re still doing press for the show, but I’ve started training for The Woman King, and I’m training with [director Gina Prince-Bythewood]. We have sessions with her on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My body is telling me to slow down here and there, so my team is trying to calm things down a little bit, but I’m excited.

That’s so incredible. You’re working with one of my heroes: Viola [Davis], to me, is… there’s about five, and she’s in that five.

I’m so excited to learn from her. I had the audition, and then for the second meeting, they sent me the script and I was with Viola. Just from our conversation, I was like, I am going to learn so much from her. And that’s what I’m most excited about. I’m just going to suck her dry from all her knowledge. [Laughs.]

I’m excited for you. I have my pom-poms on for you. I’m on the sidelines, I’m in the wings, I’m really cheering you on. I’m impressed by you as an actor, but I’m also so impressed by your bigger vision, and how you want to produce and create. And I can’t wait to see what you give us. I’m going to be reaching out. I hope that’s okay.

Not a problem at all. Thank you.

Originally Appeared on Vogue