Naomie Harris: ‘People keep asking me what it’s like to act past 40. This is the best point of my career’

She made a name for herself in James Bond and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, but it was the Oscar-winning indie film ‘Moonlight’ that changed her career and secured the British actor her first leading role in the new film ‘Black and Blue’. She speaks to Cara Buckley

Naomie Harris: ‘We all become much more interesting with life experience’ (Getty)

Naomie Harris often says her breakout role was in the 2002 post-apocalyptic thriller 28 Days Later with Cillian Murphy, but that is not exactly true.

Because even as the film was scoring at the box office and drawing critical plaudits, Harris found herself unemployed and sending out dozens of resumes and letters to casting directors, begging for work.

The same thing happened after she landed parts in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and the James Bond movie Skyfall. People told her that now the work would come flooding in – but it never did. Then along came Moonlight, the 2016 indie that ended up winning an Academy Award for Best Picture. Harris’s performance as Paula, a drug addict and mother, earned her a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars. “This is going to change everything,” people told a sceptical Harris yet again. Finally, they were right.

“With Moonlight, it was fundamentally different,” says Harris. “It has been nonstop offers and nonstop work.” It also led Harris, 43, to secure her first leading role in the new movie Black and Blue, about a rookie police officer in New Orleans grappling with suspicion from the African-American community and deep corruption in the police force. A taut, gritty thriller, the film, which also stars Tyrese Gibson, puts a spotlight on the deep distrust between many African Americans and the police.

Harris’s role as Paula, a drug addict and mother in ‘Moonlight’, earned her an Oscar nomination (Rex)

Harris will return to the big screen in 2020, reprising her role as Eve Moneypenny in the next James Bond picture, No Time to Die, and is also appearing in the forthcoming HBO and Sky One series The Third Day. She is, she says, relishing every minute of this career high.

“You want a woman that’s going to drive the story, you want a woman with depth and layers, and that happens with maturity,” she says. “We all become much more interesting with life experience.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

Even though you’re British, you seemed to have an intuitive grasp on Paula, your character in ‘Moonlight’, and Alicia, the officer in ‘Black and Blue’, who both come from marginalised communities in a country where race issues are fraught.

I don’t know whether it’s intuitive, because it requires a tremendous amount of hard work. It’s about as much exposure as possible to the kind of upbringing that the person you’re playing is from. I was really lucky I had Tyrese to act opposite. He grew up in South Central LA but was able to tell me about his experiences growing up. And I always talk about YouTube and the incredible mine of information there. I researched African-American policewomen in New Orleans, and also juvenile detention centres, because that’s Alicia’s experience.

How do relations between black communities and the police compare in Britain versus the US?

It’s an endemic problem, and it’s so sad, it’s so dark, and it’s hugely depressing. We have all the same issues that you have in the States, though it’s on a much more extreme scale in the US. We have the Black Lives Matter movement here, we have the whole issue with police brutality and police corruption and cases of black people who’ve been taken into detention and end up dead. It seems as though the system is designed in such a way so to protect officers and not to protect civilians. I don’t feel terror when I see the British police here. But, especially in New Orleans, from speaking to a lot of people on our movie set, that’s their experience when they see the police.

As Eve Moneypenny in ‘Skyfall’ (2012) (Rex) (Rex Features)

I’d like to go way, way back into ‘Simon and the Witch’, the 1980s British TV show that marked your first role. Is it right that you did not have to do auditions until later in your career?

I did do auditions, but I got every single role I ever went up for as a kid. I never heard no, which actually set me up quite badly for the adult acting profession. I spent the first year outside of drama school completely unemployed, completely unable to get any work. It was one of the most depressing periods of my life.

That ‘Moonlight’ changed everything is wonderful to hear. Do you hear comments on the fact that your biggest role came after you turned 40?

People always ask me, ‘What it’s like, you’re past 40 now?’ This is the best point of my career ever. I’m getting the most interesting roles. So I hope that myth will be laid to rest.

Can we go back to Oscars night in 2017, when ‘La La Land’ was mistakenly named the Best Picture winner and then ‘Moonlight’ ended up winning. That must’ve been so surreal. Did you expect it to win?

Harris as rookie police officer Alicia West and Tyrese Gibson as Milo Jackson in ‘Black and Blue’ (Sony Pictures)

I remember being frozen in my chair. I was so in shock that I literally couldn’t move. And all the cast and the producers and Barry [Jenkins, the director] were going up on stage, and I was just left in my chair. I would have stayed there if it wasn’t for Jeremy Kleiner [a producer on Moonlight] who came back and grabbed me.

You’ve talked previously about an audition in your twenties when a major actor put his hand up your skirt in front of the casting director and director, who said nothing.

I just chalked it up as this hideous experience that I was aware a lot of fellow actresses had experienced at some point. I wasn’t particularly traumatised by it. I just kind of thought, “OK, now it’s my turn,” and I just got on with it. I realise now that we, in that period, going back 15 years, we had to develop that resilience. It’s so indicative of the extent and scale of the problem at that time that I felt, “OK, this is what I should almost expect as an actress in this business.” It’s absolutely hideous.

Has there been a shift?

I really feel that for the next generation and current generation of actresses, that the landscape has changed in such a huge way, that it’s not acceptable anymore, and that the behaviour of men fundamentally has changed as well. I’m on a project at the moment with Jeremy Kleiner [the HBO series The Third Day]. Before we started the read-through they read a whole statement about having a zero-tolerance attitude to any form of intimidating, bullying or sexual violence against women. It was extraordinary. It actually made me well up. Once you state that at the beginning of a job, you set the whole tone for everybody on the film. And that never would have happened 15 years ago. That’s the power of the #MeToo movement and it’s extraordinary how quickly things can change.

© New York Times

Black and Blue is out now