RUTH NEGGA RECENTLY spoke to Marie Claire magazine about how far Hollywood has to go in order to achieve true equality.
The Irish-Ethiopian actress said that just because an actor who is black or of an ethnic minority wins an award, it doesn’t mean Hollywood is making the progress that it should be making.
People go, “Great! That’s all sorted!” and it drives me f**king mad. This is a continuing conversation. We have to move forward with the questions we ask and evolve with our society.
Ruth also finds it irritating that “diversity of opinion” isn’t recognised among actors of colour.
I mean, if you’re a brown woman, it doesn’t mean you have the same thoughts as another brown woman. Of course it doesn’t! It’s damaging and diminishing. We have to ask different questions.
Marie Claire’s interviewer asks Ruth why here career didn’t take off in Ireland and the UK the way that it did in America. After her success in 2005 movie Breakfast On Pluto, alongside Cillian Murphy, surely she should have reached the heights that Murphy has reached at home?
Ruth’s response was a simple raised eyebrow, leading the interviewer to consider that perhaps race is the issue.
In her Marie Claire feature, Ruth also spoke about the struggles she’s had since her father died. Ruth was born in 1982 in Ethiopia to an Irish nurse mother and an Ethiopian doctor father.
When she was four years old, she returned to Ireland with her mother, where they intended to wait on her father to follow. Ruth’s father died in a car crash two years later, before he could make it to Ireland.
I’ve always had that thing of thinking… Do I have real memories of Dad? Or have I just taken a photograph of our time together and transplanted it into my brain?
To this day, she still wonders if her dad would have been behind her dreams of acting. A part of her thinks he’d have liked if she was a doctor, but it’s safe to say that she has given him plenty to be proud of in her current vocation.
