Catching up with Thandie Newton

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Thandie Newton, who lives in London with her husband and two young daughters, had several reasons to sign on for "Run Fatboy Run."It was written by American actor-writer Michael Ian Black and the English-born Simon Pegg and marks the feature-directing debut of former "Friends" star David Schwimmer. Working on her home turf was the first draw, she says."Then Simon Pegg -- amazing, amazing -- and the fact that David was directing," Newton says by phone from Los Angeles. "It just seemed like so many fantastic ingredients."The comedy puts her at the center of a love triangle that includes Pegg ("Shaun of the Dead") as a London security guard who abandoned his pregnant fiancee at the altar and Hank Azaria ("The Simpsons") as the smooth American businessman who has come into her life five years later and possibly won her heart.After she read the script, Newton believed that her character, Libby, needed to be less reactionary, and Schwimmer agreed."We went to work giving her a more independent stature so that her choice in the end to be with whoever she wants to be (with) comes out of freedom as opposed to necessity, which was great," says Newton."So there it was. It was a delightful movie. It was easy-peasy. It didn't require research or trouble. It took me a little bit to get used to that, and I wondered whether I was really working at all."The mash-up of Brits and Yanks was no hurdle, she says."Wherever I go there's a mesh," says Newton. "I'm working with Americans all the time."It worked great. The stuff between Hank and Simon is fantastic. I think it worked beautifully well."Newton went from "Fatboy" to Guy Ritchie's "RocknRolla," alongside Gerard Butler. That "was a bit more challenging, edgier," she says."One of the things that's great, which I'm sure every actor will tell you, is that to vary work is fantastic. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. My favorites of all are the small movies, the independent movies. The ones that shoot quickly and everyone's a team. You know all the names of all the people on the set. It's just genius; love those."But then it's nice to mix it up with the bigger movies that mean that you don't have to worry about your mortgage for the whole year."Newton, 35, was born to a British father and Zimbabwean mother and grew up in Zambia and England. She intended to become a dancer, but at 16 she auditioned for a role in John Duigan's "Flirting," which earned international acclaim when it was released in 1991.Since then, she has starred in such diverse films as "Interview With the Vampire," "Jefferson in Paris," "Beloved," "Mission: Impossible II," "The Truth About Charlie," "The Chronicles of Riddick," "Crash," "The Pursuit of Happyness" and "Norbit." Her directors have included Jonathan Demme, Bernardo Bertolucci, Neil Jordan, James Ivory, John Woo and Paul Haggis, and her co-stars Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Wahlberg, Terrence Howard, Will Smith and Nicole Kidman."I think little bits of me have grown each time I've worked with these people," she says. "It's like it's a quilt, and each time there's another layer, another amazing shape that's been added onto the fabric of my life."When I look back, it's incredible. I feel so fortunate. I really, really do. There have been so many pinnacles where I thought, 'If I never worked again, how amazing.' I feel like that all the time, actually."I'm very careful to involve myself in things for the present satisfaction as opposed to thinking, 'Ah, this will lead to this.' I've never done that. I've never worried about what's going to come in the future. As a result, I've just sort of found myself working alongside extraordinary people."Newton shuns negativity."It's important to rail against the machine; of course it is," she says. "Otherwise, we'd all be fast asleep. Because it's so easy to see myself as a minority, to see myself as struggling, not being able to get the same roles as maybe conventionally acceptable leading women or whatever, there's always a reason to be negative."I had an agent once that would constantly say, 'There's no reason in the world why you can't be the next this.' And he would say that all the time to try and rev me up and get me excited."And I suddenly woke up one morning and thought, 'I'm Thandie, and that's something to really celebrate. I don't want to be constantly striving to be something. What about today? What about this minute? What about everything up to this point? It's fantastic. I want to just enjoy this bit. I want to enjoy everything that's happened today and feel proud and honored.'"So I promptly said goodbye and went on my way. ... For me personally, the way I stay in this business with enthusiasm is by, wherever possible, noting the joy, the beauty, just what's excellent about every situation that I'm in."(Contact Knoxville News Sentinel film critic Betsy Pickle at pickle(at)knews.com.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)