Cynthia Erivo is determined to embrace different challenges.
Cynthia Erivo has discussed her new project
The 39-year-old actress portrays Tessa Ensler, a woman from a working-class background who becomes a barrister, in Prima Facie, the new drama movie, and Cynthia has revealed that she relished the challenges of the role.
The actress – who is best known for playing Elphaba in the Wicked film franchise – told The Hollywood Reporter: “They’re polar opposites, but I think that’s kind of how I like it — I like being able to move from thing to thing, and I don’t want them to be similar.
“I want to be able to go, ‘Okay, this is something that I learned from. Now it’s time to go and learn something else’.
“For want of a better analogy, it was nice to come back to the ground.”
In the movie, Cynthia’s on-screen character is the victim of an assault, and the actress worked closely with an intimacy coordinator in order to approach the material “uninhibited”.
She explained: “It really was about where my limit was, how far it goes — and if we get lost, how to get back into the room.
“When I’m lying on the floor, how much skin is showing? What point of view are we using and when are we using it? How gradual does it begin? When does it become really obvious that something’s happening? Lizzy would be really sensitive about how we would take those moments subtly and turn up the volume as we needed to.
“There were moments where we would slip, where it would go too far for me. I would go too far and it would be hard to come back — there were moments of having little panic attacks, where I’d get way too emotional. But [the intimacy coordinator] was right there.”
Susanna White, the film’s director, was always convinced that Cynthia was the perfect candidate for the role of Tessa.
The filmmaker explained: “Cynthia is very brave, and we needed a brave actor who was going to go on that journey.
“Tessa has to be that person to survive in an unequal world. She comes from a working class background. She’s an outsider in so many ways in terms of her being a woman of colour, in a system where there are far more men than women — and I knew that Cynthia had the range to do that.”
Prima Facie is showing at the Toronto International Film Festival – even though it still doesn’t have a US distributor.
Susanna reflected: “The devastation of women’s rights in the US has been such a marker for this time. So I hope we find a distributor that really understands the paradigm we’re interrogating — so that we can go deeply into all of America.”