There are many moments in Passing when the camera finds Tessa Thompson’s Irene Redfield, a Black woman in 1920s Harlem, in the act of looking. Sometimes she seems to be staring into the abyss of nothingness, sometimes she’s staring at a crack, sometimes at her husband. But, most often, she’s staring at Ruth Negga’s Clare Kendry, whose presence in the film is electric.
Rebecca Hall, who has written and directed the adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, understands the paradoxical desire and repulsion that carry the relationship at the film’s centre. Clare, a childhood friend of Irene, floats back into her life at a chance meeting at a restaurant in the white part of New York. Clare’s entrance upends both of their lives. Clare, clad in white – a ghost or an angel – is mixed-race, and living a life passing for white with a racist husband who knows nothing of her past. When Irene first sees Clare in the early parts of the film, the camera becomes an extension of Irene’s eyes, entranced by her and desperate for another glimpse.
As Clare, Negga is the object of desire whose performance feels like the fulcrum of Passing. She is seductive. She is thoughtful. She is an object of wonder and confusion, but also hers is a performance imbued with searing clarity. She cuts through Irene’s life and ours. Tessa Thompson must communicate that desire in her performance. Irene is jealous of her husband’s rapport with Clare. But she is also jealous and covetous of Clare’s attention. Does she want Clare? Does she want to be Clare? But if Thompson must sell that conflicting desire and repulsion, Ruth Negga must convince us of that magnetism. Take for example, an early scene in Passing. Hours into her reunion with Irene, the two are interrupted by Clare’s husband, John. He does not know she is not white, and Irene is startled by his explicit racism. Irene watches John as he voices his contempt for Black people. As Clare, Ruth physically feigns casual insouciance at John’s conversation. Her face is marked by a casual half-smile, her eyes are darting to Irene – in warning, but also a plea, but something else. It’s part of the ambiguity of Clare. It’s a performance within a performance. It’s a kind of role that could be limited in lesser hands, but Negga is expertly equipped for the challenge.
Since the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year up to the recent publicity run for awards season that is underway, Ruth Negga – a mixed raced Ethiopian and Irish actress – has revealed a sharp intuitiveness about this role, its source and what its complexity means. Even in a season of actors excited to speak about their work, she stands out. It’s not just that she is excited to speak about her work and her colleagues on Passing, but her relationship with the mysteriousness of Clare is hinged on her passionate engagement with the complexities of a woman who resists categorisation. Negga discussed her relationship with the novella and the character in a conversation with me in early December.
This interview has been condensed for clarity and includes major spoilers for the film Passing, which is currently available on Netflix.
Ruth Negga: How are you doing?
Andrew Kendall: I am good, how are you doing?
RN: I’m great.
AK: I know you’re very busy. I am so grateful that you took the time out to meet with me.
RN: Are you in Guyana?
AK: Yes, I am in Guyana, South America.
RN: Ooooooh. I’m so excited. [She grins, motioning offscreen.] My lovely hairstylist is Guyanese. So, we’re really excited. [Sounds offscreen.] Marcia, says hi. So, we’re very thrilled.
AK: Where in Guyana is she from?
RN: Georgetown, GT.
AK: Well, I am also in Georgetown. Well, tell her, I am happy to know that you are in good hands, then.
RN: Yay, we’re smiling here a lot.
AK: Okay, so I’m just going to get started here. I have so many questions and I know we don’t have much time. You know I’m actually teaching the novella, Passing, in my Women and Literature class this semester at my university.
RN: Really? That’s amazing!
AK: Yes, so we watched the movie earlier this week, and we’ve been thinking of the adaptation in relation to Nella’s prose. It’s actually when I saw the movie all the way back at Sundance that I felt like I needed to teach this novel. It reminded me of how complex and relevant this almost 100-year-old text is, and it reminded me of the work film adaptations of novels do in kind of bringing older works back into contemporary conversations. And I’ve heard you speak so thoughtfully in interviews about your relationship with Nella Larsen, both with Passing and her first novella Quicksand, which you have such depths of knowledge about. In thinking of how many canonical texts from white authors are adopted and adapted and readapted and so many persons their first encounter with Shakespeare or Jane Austen or Tennessee is from a film –
RN: Yes!
AK: How does it feel, then, knowing that people who come to Passing now might not come to it from the novel first but it might be with this film and with you? What does it mean for someone like you who has built this relationship with the novella even before the film?
RN: Well, I’m just beyond thrilled. I mean I’m beyond thrilled. I’m so excited and happy that you did that because, like, to be honest, part of the reason I love acting and I came to acting and I like film and storytelling is that I feel that we see ourselves, and we work things out and we develop compassion and empathy for ourselves and others through art and literature. And that’s very important for me. That’s how I found a home in literature. I felt seen and witnessed and less alone in the world because of literature. And that’s one of the really amazing effects of art. It makes you feel like there are others like you in the world. I’m always very interested in who gets to tell stories and who gets to have their stories heard and I’m continually shocked by the many artists and creatives of colour that have not been illuminated, that have not had a light shone on them. And, for me, Nella Larsen is definitely one of those.
When I first read Passing — I read it before I read Quicksand — I found myself putting it down at some moments. You know when you’re reading a book and you put it down several times because you just need to absorb what you just read and think about it? Because it feels like you were fated to read this? And there’s all of this energy and karma and you just know that something important is happening and you’re very aware of it and you just need to absorb it and digest it? That’s what I felt when I first read these novels. For me, Passing is masterpiece. It’s a psychological masterpiece and it’s also a sensual masterpiece because it’s a very sensual novel. And at the same time, it’s super intelligent. And, it’s a reminder that the sensual is not base. It’s an intelligence that’s all its own. And, I think sometimes we put so much emphasis on the intellect and the cerebral and we forget about the body and how they integrate and how they’re so indebted to one another. This book encapsulates that. It’s super sensual and sensory and yet it’s so disarming with its sharp, concise, scalpel-sharp dissection of human nature of a specific source of time and place.
AK: That’s such a striking reading of the novel, and you’re already presenting a question I had in my notes. I was listening to an interview you had where you mentioned that your own resistance to separating the visceral and the intellectual as a kind of binary? And you know there’s that kind of unfortunate adherence to binaries – this is either sensual or intellectual, this is masculine or feminine, this is cerebral or brawny. And so much about reading of Clare on film is about this woman who is navigating between what we might think of as binaries. She’s neither this nor that, or she’s both. In your preparation for this performance, how did you work to balance or even conceptualise navigation between those kinds of polarities? Especially when as the character, and as the actor embodying the character, you’re carrying the weight of both sides of the binaries with you?
RN: The short answer is, I read the book a few times and did a lot of research and I just dove in and hoped for the best. But that’s why I was so struck when I read the novel first and why I had to keep putting it down. It’s got all these complexities and nuances in the writing. It doesn’t do the work for you and is really testing you, in a way. And, also sort of impressing on you, the absolute necessity of reminding ourselves that human beings are deeply complex and contradictory beings. And that in our efforts to understand ourselves, we have created these binaries that are deeply unhelpful.
And I understand that, because archetypes have been invented for a reason. They’re there to help us, I suppose, understand ourselves and to put a label on this so it’s clear. But, it’s actually counterintuitive because no one is one thing, no one is even just two things. We are a mixture of who we are, how we’ve been brought up, our likes our dislikes, our physical makeup, our intellect, when we’re born, who we’re born to… All of these different things, creating this multi-faceted wonderful human. That’s what makes it so exciting. So, I kind of get frustrated by our collective need to reduce everything to the common denominator. We’re so much richer than that. So much. And Nella sees that and recognises that and for me, for a Black woman to write about women of colour I feel such pride. I need that. We – Black women – need that because we haven’t been allowed to explore that in the arts as much. It feels like for so long, especially in acting, we’ve been peripheral and serving a narrative for the privilege.
AK: Do you think that element of resisting binaries, that kind of ambivalence in her writing, kind of kept Nella Larsen’s work from being truly understood by contemporaneous reviewers? Like even for those who liked it, there was a sense of its nuances not really being explored. In reading reviews from the time, she’s already one of the few female writers of the Harlem Renaissance, then there’s the way she’s playing around with the expectations of this tragic mulatto figure in Clare. But there is so much ambivalence here that, like you say. It’s not what you anticipate with this kind of story. She’s able to look at her own world, her own time-period, with a sense of clarity that feels really significant and even surprising at points.
RN: This is what I find endlessly fascinating, Andrew. I feel the same way and I feel sort of embarrassed about that because we have this idea about humanity and evolution as this linear sort of progression and that we’re always improving on the last generation, right? For some reason we’ve bought into that and I don’t know if that’s necessarily entirely true, you know?
As a woman of colour, I’m fascinated by history but I’m also sort of horrified. Because, to find my place in history, for a woman of colour, it’s not going to be very kind to me physically, or emotionally. It’s a very narrow arc that I would be allowed. And it’s terrifying. But it’s also fascinating that someone like Nella hasn’t been, will not be, cowed by that. Will not be reduced by that. And it also makes me feel for her so much. Can you imagine being that clever and astute and brilliant and living in a society that not only doesn’t acknowledge it but is doing its damnedest to not allow you to be that? A society that’s doing its damnedest to curtail your options? A society that’s doing its damnedest to prevent your potential from being realised? It makes me luminously angry.
The next portion of the interview includes a major spoiler for the ending of the film.
AK: Luminously angry. I like that. When I think of what you’re doing in Passing, I feel that that luminous anger that you feel for Nella is put into Clare in a way. Not in the ways that we might expect anger to be seen, but in some complex ways. There’s a particular moment in the film that has genuinely been haunting since February. It’s the very last image of your face in the film, you’re looking up at Bellew just before Clare dies but the way Rebecca shoots you, you’re looking out at us. And there’s this uncanny look on your face. And, of course the film is so great because it keeps that ambiguity of the novel. Is she pushed by Irene? By Bellew? Did she jump? Did she fall? The look on your face, though, is so chilling. There’s this note of defiance, but also a sense of such clarity. It’s not tragic or sad but it’s unnerving. Please tell me about reaching that moment, and that look.
RN: I love that you say that, because the interesting thing is that we talked about the ending a lot on set. About that ambivalence in the novel, about the ending and the beauty of keeping that in the film. It was very important for Rebecca to keep that ambivalence in the moment on screen. To keep it tight and the tension tight. Because it is a thriller, you know? So many people have said to me, “I didn’t realise I was holding my breath until the end.” And I go wow and I’ve told Rebecca this. That is the greatest compliment, I think, to a filmmaker. You know you’re physically unaware of the physical repercussions of what you’re seeing, that is extraordinary. So, I think the ending kind of exalted that and kept it within like a North Star. It was as if everything we’d filmed, because we shot that moment quite late on, everything we had filmed and everything we’d researched and everything we had absorbed, was waiting for that moment. We were waiting for the combination of that.
And for me. [She pauses.] You know, I get very emotional because there were so many things going on there, for me. I always think when you’re playing your character, you are like their advocate; you are their defender in many ways but you also have to be very clear-eyed. And, I love the word you used there – clarity. I’m obsessed with that word at the moment because I love this feeling that in moments of extreme danger, one feels alive; every bit of your cellular nature is alive and ready. And it’s really an extraordinary thing because you go, “Oh, this is what alive – being alive – means.” And, it’s so intense because you’re the most alive [when] you are in danger, that’s amazing to me. And, I wanted her to feel her most alive but also her most calm. This is her moment of clarity. Even if she doesn’t understand it intellectually, and honestly, I think she does, but there’s something in her there.
When I say that we are all responsible for Clare’s death, the fact that Clare is a threat to the status quo everywhere it’s as if, in a metaphorical way, she cannot survive. But it’s different from that trope of, you know, burying your gays? And it’s not about that. It’s about presenting your audience with this collective guilt, this collective responsibility. It’s not just that it could be the white man who pushes her out the window. It could be the Black woman. It could be her. But there’s culpability all around. But I don’t want her dying to be that kind of the burial, you know? It’s not that for me. Instead, it’s a kind of surrender. And, surrender has gotten such a bad rap because we feel like it’s powerless. But actually, it takes a great deal of courage to surrender, and for me that’s a moment of surrender. I really think, and that’s for me, Ruth, I really feel she did the f***ing best she could. She really lived and she refused to not live. She felt every feeling; she wanted to feel every feeling. And, even if the feeling was bad, she welcomed it and said, ‘this is the truth’. She admits to Irene, “I’ll jump on anyone to get what I want.” What kind of person admits to that? Either a really nasty psychopath or sociopath or…?
AK: Someone really self-aware.
RN: Exactly, Someone deeply in touch with their own humanity and super self-aware.
AK: I appreciate how intensely you know and think and talk about Clare. And I want to know, where did you find her voice? Did you find her with a dialect coach? Did you know what she would sound like before you started shooting? You mentioned that seductive quality of the prose earlier and Clare operates the same way in the film. As if she breathes this note of desire into Irene, and her voice is so key to that. Where did you find that?
RN: You know, in the book you get the feeling that she’s charming, but in a really like – how do I say – common way. Like, she’s kind of like a blatant seductress in some ways. She’s not hiding it. She’s not being demure. She’s revelling in it. It kind of feels, at times, that it might be a bit a bit cheap and she doesn’t care about it. And I love that about her. But, in playing her, I didn’t want to play her as just this femme fatale in the performance. Because, that’s really boring and it’s really flat. That’s not interesting; there’s no tension and there’s no conflict with that. But she does have a hyper-femininity that she really enjoys embodying and the voice is part of it. I did a Southern accent for my TV show Preacher and I just done that before Passing and I had a couple months off. And I felt that I had to get rid of this Southern accent because this is set in the North. And then I was, looking at pictures of that time and a lot of women with blonde hair and wigs. I kept thinking of Blanche DuBois, that kind of thing, those kinds of Southern Belles. But I didn’t want to milk that too much. Instead, what I wanted was this idea of performance. If she’s going to pass then she needs this sort of pretence of a performance in passing. And if she’s going to do this then she’s going to go all in and have fun and create her character. And, this bit isn’t as explicit in the film, but Clare has this not very safe, or balanced childhood. And people like that, I feel they always feel as if they’re rewriting themselves because they’re trying to find something that fits. They’re rewriting their trauma and their own narrative. So, I thought, this voice could be another aspect of her performance and what kind of in-joke could it be to have her be this kind of Gone with the Wind Character, but she’s a woman of colour. Or a Gone with the Wind type.
AK: Aaah, so your own way of Scarlett O’Hara deconstructed before its time.
RN: Yes! And I thought this is her own kind of little in-joke with herself. I don’t know, something about that that dropped in. And, it wasn’t something explicit or knowledge that I’d consider every draw. It was something in the prep, that I thought would make her fun in a way. Because she wants to have fun. She wants to live! She wants to feel! And I think that’s so important. That’s the most revolutionary thing you can do when everything about society and the government and the law and everything is telling you that you can’t. It’s telling you that you can’t be happy. It’s telling you that you can’t find joy. It’s telling you that you can’t have this job, you can’t have this education. Can you imagine? To even feel and want to feel and experience everything is so radical. I’m talking about Nella now and I know Nella was. And, to me, this is too long of a wait. But it’s here. This movie is here, and what Rebecca has done is she’s illuminated something that’s been hidden in the shadows too long. And we all get to benefit from it now.
