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For most people, Friday, Feb. 16 was a relatively normal day, if a slightly busier one than usual. The night before, Black Panther hit theaters to much fanfare, and many of us were gearing up for a sunnier-than-normal winter weekend. But for Wrinkle in Time actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Feb. 16 had a special meaning. It was the day she decided that after years of standing back and watching everyone else speak up, she wouldn’t — she couldn’t — stay quiet any longer.
“With everything that’s going on in the world, I felt galvanized and inspired by Time’s Up, and I was starting to question whether I was using my voice as efficiently as I could,” she tells me, when we speak shortly after she joined Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook in one fell swoop. “I think as an actress, I’ve always believed maybe an old-fashioned idea that mystique was valuable and all of that stuff in terms of your career and acting,” she continues. “But I just couldn’t deny that what was going on in the world, with the women’s movement especially… it’s better to contribute than shy away and stay silent.”
As one of Hollywood’s most prolific yet enigmatic actors, Mbatha-Raw has spent her career disappearing — into roles, into costumes, seemingly into thin air the moment she’s done promoting a project. Despite her near-constant presence on-screen (in the last five weeks alone, she’s starred in three new movies), fans know little about who she actually is. What she likes, what she believes, what she wants to share with the world have all been a mystery. As her lack of social media showed, there’s long been a thick, impenetrable veil between the actor’s performances and her personal life. [More at source]
