Zawe Ashton is urging me to try a gong bath. Apparently there’s a wonderful gong-bonger in Margate. The actress-writer-director then rhapsodises about cacao ceremonies. “You think about the things that you want to manifest in your life and you draw pictures to get out of the left brain,” she explains. “Then you drink spiritually charged ancient cacao. It has such healing and intense properties that you sometimes get visions.”
Whether because of manifested success or otherwise, Ashton’s star has been rising ever since she played Vod, the lovable, lawless punk in the comedy series Fresh Meat, from 2011 until 2016. Since then she has starred opposite her real-life fiancé, Tom Hiddleston, in Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in the West End and on Broadway, and appeared in quirky horror-thrillers (Velvet Buzzsaw) and period drama (Mr Malcolm’s List). Now she has shifted gears again, this time into superhero blockbusterville. Expectations are high for The Marvels, which comes out next month. It’s a female-led project with Ashton playing the villain Dar-Benn and Brie Larson in the lead. Nia DaCosta, 33, is at the helm as both the youngest person and first black woman to direct a Marvel movie.
Hackney born and bred, Ashton has clearly won over Hollywood, but she recognises its shameless hustle too. “One of the last times I was there there was a phrase that people were using — ‘You’ve got to feed the heat to the heat monsters’,” she recalls, guffawing. “Because everything is heat, everything is potential.”
Now 39, Ashton has been in the business of, er, feeding heat to the heat monsters for almost three decades. In 1995 she appeared as “Little Girl” in the BBC series Game On, then came parts in The Demon Headmaster, The Bill and Casualty. Her parents — Victoria, a retired teacher from Uganda, and Paul, an author from London — would ferry Ashton to after-school classes. Her brother and sister, Sam and Amy, came along more than five years later: “I was that first-born child who got a bit of time with their parents first, which is really specific.”
She lights up talking about the Anna Scher Theatre, a performing arts institution in Islington, north London, that was also attended by Naomie Harris, Daniel Kaluuya and Patsy Palmer (“Hello, throwback icon!” she says of the EastEnders star). “On the first day I honestly fell in love with it. It sounds cheesy or corny or made up, but I walked in and thought, ‘I know what I want to do.’”
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However, during the days at her all-girls school she was being so badly bullied that she ultimately had to leave. “I was tall and skinny, had a gap in my teeth, was an indie kid, weirdly nerdy, I knew what I wanted to do with my life,” she says, sipping a glass of malbec in a west London pub. It was a deeply lonely experience and for years she didn’t confide in her parents, though her crisis later became clear. “I was dropping weight from anxiety, so I had to roll my school skirt up because I was skin and bone.”
Another part of Ashton’s childhood was regular visits to Uganda, where her grandfather was acting president for a time: “His involvement in the independence of Uganda was huge, and that’s something I take deep pride in.” A recent play she watched by her friend the actress Sutara Gayle reminded her that “until you know your ancestors, essentially you’re flying a little bit blind”. Ashton continues: “I feel very lucky to have had that contact, because if you don’t sometimes there can feel like there are some unanswered questions.”
In her late teens, when Ashton started applying for full-time drama schools, her mother became seriously ill with cancer. “You just feel so lost and you’re not prepared for that level of vulnerability in anyone in your life.” Winning a place at Manchester School of Theatre meant leaving her mum in London. “It was like, ‘OK, if you’re going to go, it has got to be worth it.’”
Fast-forward to today, and the sacrifice and slog were worth it (and happily her mum recovered). As well as acting on stage and screen, Ashton has written plays, published an autobiographical novel and directed short films. And on top of all that there’s her growing family life: Ashton and Hiddleston welcomed their first child last year. Having also become a mother recently, I’m desperate to compare experiences. Does Hiddleston — an Eton and Cambridge-educated actor best known for playing Loki in the Marvel Cinematic Universe — pull his weight with night shifts and nappy changes? Do the couple set rules about time spent working away? But Ashton makes clear that any details about her family are off limits. Instead I bring up the general tidal shift that comes with having children. “The place that I’m at right now is the past, present and future working in a really special alignment,” she says, treading carefully. “It’s the most unparalleled and important role I will ever have and I look forward to being in dialogue about it when the moment is right. Listening is serving my energy best as a mother right now. I’m brand new to this and absorbing all the knowledge and stories I can.”
These days Hiddleston, 42, also keeps shtoom (one suspects he is scarred after triggering a media firestorm by wearing an “I ♥ TS” vest while dating Taylor Swift in 2016). Still, Ashton and Hiddleston won rave reviews for Betrayal in 2019, made their first red-carpet appearance as a couple in September 2021 and, the following June, Ashton was back in front of the flashbulbs along with a baby bump. “I honestly think any performer is trying their absolute best to balance it all and work out how to be in the public sphere and talk about the work while also keeping the things that are sacred sacred,” Ashton says.
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Nevertheless, on certain subjects she is frank. In her 2019 autobiographical novel, Character Breakdown, she brilliantly skewered the acting industry: the greasy agents, the sexual aggressors, the sexism and racism. “How long have you got?” Ashton quips when I bring up body image. “The gaze on my world is deeply patriarchal. There’s so much time that I’ve wasted wishing that I was thinner. It boils down to that sometimes. Just wishing that that gaze would accept you, choose you. And that’s a problem.”
As a tall woman (5ft 10in), Ashton would always end up playing ghosts or mothers in her school plays — “very much stalking the battlements” — which was an early introduction to how actors get narrowly categorised. “If you’ve got short hair or if you’re a tall lady, you’re a category of supporting actor, like best friend roles. If you’re a leading lady, you’re definitely blonde and attractive.”
In Character Breakdown she detailed a hideous real-life experience in which a film executive trapped her alone at night, insisted that she was the perfect leading lady for his forthcoming movie and pressured her into improvising a scene that involved him forcefully attacking, groping and kissing her. She was not yet 21. “That person has actually, in the past few years, been charged with some really heavy stuff,” Ashton says. “I was in a privileged position to write about it, rather than be capsized by it like some people I know have been.”
These days Ashton deliberately seeks out work with first-time female directors and gives talks to empower up-and-coming actors. “I say, ‘You will be in so many rooms where you are so sure that person holds the keys to not only your business but also the world. And that you, in turn, hold no keys to anything, not even yourself. And that’s just not true.’”
It has been a long road to reach this professional success — Ashton had stints working as a pot washer, a theatre usher and a call-centre agent — and she is clearly grateful for the breaks, especially Fresh Meat’s Vod. “That character is the gift that keeps on giving,” she says, explaining how strangers often tell her that they watched her as they grew up. “I do get a bit tearful when I think about it. Especially when young actors of colour have said to me, ‘I just didn’t see anyone until I saw you.’”
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After the triumph of Fresh Meat, Ashton wrote her own series, but it got stuck in developmental hell with a producer repeatedly undermining her. “Egos are so unbelievably fragile in the world I work in.” This was a time before Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag. “There was this question mark over whether people would believe an interracial family on television,” Ashton recalls, shaking her head.
When she was first finding success, big-name fashion companies refused to dress her for premieres while happily dressing lesser-known white actors. “I made a decision really early on that if I experienced that I would not wear that person, even if they were a lauded name,” Ashton says. These days she wears clothes designed by friends: Emilia Wickstead, Roksanda Ilincic, The Vampire’s Wife.
Over our pub session Ashton fizzes with energy and warmth. With her young family at home, interesting work pouring in and the chance to help others progress in her brutal business, life seems pretty good. “You’ve been walking up this huge mountain and not ever looking over the edge. That’s youth, like, ‘I’m going to keep running up this mountain.’ But there’s a huge, steep fall,” she says. “You get to a certain age where you just feel so happy to have got to a point on the mountain and you haven’t fallen off.”
The Marvels is in cinemas on November 10
Styling: Victoria Bain
Hair: Tomi Roppongi at Julian Watson Agency using Maria Nila
Make-up: Kirstin Piggott at Julian Watson Agency using Westman Atelier
Nails: Saffron Goddard at CLM using Dior
Production: 2DM Production