Whether she’s balancing big Hollywood films with smaller, award-winning indies or trying to save the enviornment while raising her kids Thandie Newton is a woman on a mission.
“Because I’m not a typical homegirl,” actress Thandie Newton recalls, “one of the first things I said to him was, ‘what’s that tattoo? It looks like a penis.’ And it did!” Newton shakes her head at the memory of her very English gaucheness. “And he laughed and laughed and laughed. I think it was actually a crucifix. My filthy English mind!”
The “he” Newton’s referring to is the late rap star Tupac Shakur, with whom she co-starred in the 1997 film Gridlock’d, Vondie Curtis-Hall’s darkly comic drama about Detroit junkies. “He was so…fertile!” she exclaims, meaning the potency of his mind rather than the potency of, well, his seed. “(Shakur) was a smart guy, and…he would talk to me. (His) whole street persona would go, and he would just talk. I didn’t know anything about him.” When she asked him about another mark on this body, “He said , ‘It’s a scar from being shot.’ ‘What?! you were shot?’ He’s like [incredulously], ‘You don’t know I was shot at point blank range?’ He told me the whole story about how he was shot for the first time in his goolies [testes], then his fucking skull. But it was someone sweet telling you the story.
“But then I also saw him angry one night and drunk, and I thought, ‘OK, that’s what (the violence) is all about…”
