This is such a pleasant surprise! Ruth Negga covers the January issue of Vogue Magazine to promote her Oscar-baity role in Loving. I want to see Loving so badly but it hasn’t come to my town yet. I went into this Vogue interview not knowing much of anything about Ruth and I came out really liking her. She’s funny and girly but not twee (she’s 35 years old, but she looks like a 20-something ageless vampire), and she doesn’t shy away from discussing racial politics. Her mother is Irish, and her late father was Ethiopian. She was born in Ethiopia, but she and her mother moved to Ireland when she was four years old, and she grew up with Irish cousins and the Irish side of her family. You can read the full Vogue piece here, and here are some highlights:

Ending up in Ireland: “We were going to go to America but my dad didn’t get out in time.” Three years later, her father died in a car accident. “We found out in a letter and a phone call,” she remembers. “This was 1988. There wasn’t any grief counseling for kids.” Her mother was devastated and never remarried. “She’s a survivor. Very like Mildred.” Unlike Mildred Loving, though, Negga’s mother didn’t encounter any prejudice from being in an interracial marriage. “My mum never experienced that—I mean, never,” Negga says.

She didn’t feel different growing up in Ireland: “I remember thinking, I’m just me. When you’re a kid, you’re just you, aren’t you? It was when I moved to England that I felt it, because I was Irish and black.”

Being drawn to the African-American experiences of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and James Baldwin: “I didn’t have that many black people in my life, so I had to sort of search them out. And I didn’t grow up in America, but I identified as much with their writing about the black experience as I did with their writing about the human experience.”

How she feels returning to Ethiopia: “I find it difficult because it was an abrupt sort of ending to a lot of my life. I’m always very careful to say I’m Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I look Ethiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don’t know any of them.”

How she identifies racially, nationality-wise: “People have always made assumptions about me. I become very territorial about my identity because it’s been hijacked by so many people, with their own projections.” Understandably, she doesn’t want to be pinned down, reserving the right to change her mind, about herself or anything else. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t change their mind,” she says.

She’s been with Dominic Cooper for seven years: “Seven years… What’s that in. . . .actor years? Forty-nine million!” She describes their working pattern as “brilliant. Because we just get on really well.” Their costarring in Preacher wasn’t entirely planned, however. “I had the script first. And he put me on tape for it, reading, and then he was like: ‘Hold on a minute; this is really good.’ I showed him the comic-book cover, and it’s basically his face.”

The lack of diversity in Hollywood: “[It has been] unacceptable for a long time, and it’s becoming clearly an embarrassment. The film is reminding us that there’s a conversation that we need to be having still. It does annoy Joel and me when people say it’s a quiet film. Because it doesn’t feel very quiet to us. It feels really loud.”

[From Vogue]

I don’t really understand her weirdness about how she identifies racially and nationality-wise. I mean, isn’t it pretty clear-cut? She’s half-white and half-black. Half-Irish and half-Ethiopian. She could call herself biracial, mixed race, black, white, Irish, Ethiopian or whatever she chooses. I think it’s probably more of a case of nations wanting to “claim” Ruth as their own. Ethiopians are probably like, “She’s ours, she’s Ethiopian!” And the Irish want to claim her too. And she lives in London, so the Brits want to claim her too. Also: I totally forgot that she and Dominic have been together so long. She was his jumpoff from Amanda Seyfried, does anyone else remember that? But now I’m thinking it’s more like Dominic met Ruth and everything clicked. Sweet.

Photos courtesy of Mario Testino for Vogue.