Gugu Mbatha-Raw: Pop culture makes it seem like ‘mixed-race people are a new thing’

Gugu Mbatha-Raw covers the latest issue of British Vogue. This is her first-ever Vogue cover! And she’s working it. I love this cover image – my only complaint is that it’s possibly a little bit TOO cropped on her face. I want a better look at what she’s wearing! Anyway, Gugu is promoting her role in A Wrinkle In Time. She plays Dr. Kate Murry, the mom to the lead little girl, and wife to Chris Pine’s character. Gugu talks to British Vogue about AWIT and the other role that made her famous, the lead role in Belle. Some highlights:

A Wrinkle In Time, working with Ava DuVernay: The film marks the first time a black woman has helmed a $100 million film, and seems a fitting summary of Mbatha-Raw’s own boundary breaking career trajectory so far. “The chance to work with Ava again, and what it means for a woman of colour to be directing something of that scale and budget for Disney – I wanted to be in that line.”

Bonding with Oprah? “We were both on the set on the same day and she came and hung out in my trailer for a little bit and we had a chat, in her full character regalia, which is just goddess-like. I hope we actually get to do something where we work together in a scene because that’d be incredible. I feel so thankful to have her in my life and to have had her guidance. She’s a very special human.”

Her role in Belle: “I didn’t really see how I could be in a period drama without playing a slave, necessarily, or a character in a very subservient or brutalised role. As a biracial woman born in the 1980s, if you let popular culture dictate it, you’d think mixed-race people were like a new thing. And that’s absolutely not the case. People of colour have existed throughout history – it’s just who has been able to tell the stories. And that to me became really important: to illuminate that. To show that Dido Elizabeth Belle is as valid a story as Elizabeth Bennet… And, you know, Elizabeth Bennet’s fictional.”

[From British Vogue]

OMG, I’m feeling her so much on “if you let popular culture dictate it, you’d think mixed-race people were like a new thing.” Exactly. As much as I enjoy the very recent increased visibility of mixed-race celebrities and people of color in general, I do have moments where I think: where was all of this when I was growing up?? Why did I feel like such an oddity, some kind of “exotic” biracial person who had never been seen before?

Photos courtesy WENN, cover courtesy of British Vogue.