Gugu Mbatha-Raw on the cover of UK Harper's Bazaar

[ms_mmelissa]

https://instagram.com/p/B9Obt3bhQ_O

• Gugu is promoting her new film Misbehaviour about the 1970 Miss World pageant.
• Met Jennifer Hosten, the first black Miss World winner who she plays in the film, irl.
• Her father is South African but she only visisted there for the first time when she was 30.
• Lives in L.A. now.
• Upcoming roles include the Loki TV show

Comments

[ms_mmelissa]

Ugh I understand it so well. Lots of things going against it. A woman director (even if she's white), black women leads, premiering at SXSW instead of somewhere like Sundance. All those little nicks and cuts crippling the film's chances of getting a theatrical release. At least it's online and lots of people can watch it. I would have loved to see it on the big screen though.

But all the more kudos to Julia Hart for casting Gugu. I read an interview where she talked about casting her and she said she and her producer husband saw Beyond the Lights and fell in love with her (her taste! 🙌🏼). And Gugu is biracial and Hart made the character biracial and absolutely could have taken the more prominent parent role and cast the mother as white. She resisted that and she resisted casting a light-skinned or white passing child as the daughter.

Anyway I have a lot of feelings about this since black history month ended and I've been watching a lot of movies by and about black women and realizing how many white women spend their entire careers without ever working with a single actor of colour. I can count the white directors who advocated like Hart did on one hand. It's so, so frustrating that cinema is still so segregated.