In a way, an eating disorder was just like, Okay, I need to finish myself off. All you need is one of those to really drive you into the dust. It’s like a shark smelling blood in the water. You get predators and sexual abusers, they can smell it a mile off. It was like I had to give something back for being noticed. What were you going to say? That you had a complicated relationship with … ? I let other people do the choosing for me. What happened for me was I had a very complicated relationship with … I never chose. I suffered quite badly for a couple of years from anorexia, and it all feeds into this. Because there’s so much about not having a sense of my value. It just made me super-vulnerable to predators. We didn’t talk about it at the time, but the damage was so done. Because she was so proud of me, she wanted to compensate. We didn’t have much money, but when I got home, she had bought me this beautiful figurine of two dancers. The last year I was in her school, I remember I didn’t get the prize, and my mom had obviously realized I wasn’t going to get it. It’s If I don’t do this, no one’s going to let me do anything else again, ever. It’s not pride in my work or pride in the perfectionism. Because, look, this all instilled in me a work ethic and perfectionism. It was screamingly obvious that I should have been given prizes. She would give this ceramic ballet dancer, like a little kind of Oscar. The dance teacher - and I don’t mean her any ill, I’m not slagging her off, but it’s the truth - at the end of every year, she’d give prizes. So at the end of every year, there’d be this big performance we’d all do in this dance school. I’d always be given the solo to make the school look good. Not even like jazz or fucking modern - that would have been way too ghetto. We didn’t have capoeira and this and that. I had this dance teacher, ’cause ballet was my thing. They didn’t want to express it, because they didn’t want to praise the Black girl. There was a lot that people could have been interested in in me when I was young. One of the reasons why is because I was not considered anything. When I set out in the adult world, I was pretty young - 16 was when I started working in movies. I think it’s hugely to do with my ethnicity. When you were a kid, you said you didn’t feel like you were beautiful, but I think people consider you beautiful. I think Maeve is a metaphor for the dispossessed in the world, and she’s become that kind of leader, but she’s not had a chance to lead, and I don’t think she necessarily should. In the first season, she was driving, dominating, pretty straightforward. She’s following other people’s leads, by and large. And then the second and third season has Maeve with a different directive, but it’s not her own. I’m not surprised that it hooked people in. Well, season one, the evolution of this robot who then has the revelation that she’s not human, and that she had a past that involved a child, and the betrayal of that, and then using information to empower herself - it was such a powerful story. I do have frustrations with Maeve, but that’s part of her story line. Where I do have a degree of choice is in taking the role, but once I’m in, I’m a team player. I like to stay sane about my position, which is that I am being employed to tell someone else’s story. Do you have conversations with the showrunners around the arc of the season or where you would like your character to go? In Westworld, your performance is so poignant, both ferocious and beautiful. And I’d come off 12 months of pretty intense work with Westworld. I was loving it, but also willing its end because it was that demanding. I was in Montana doing a movie, God’s Country. What were you doing when lockdown first started? My son, who’s 6, my 15-year-old daughter, and my 19-year-old daughter, whose girlfriend is living with us too. We currently have my family in isolation.
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