Zawe Ashton as Josephina in 'Velvet Buzzsaw' Is the Role She Was Born to Play
Zawe Ashton’s Velvet Buzzsaw audition started with a visit to the emergency room. Distracted by grief over the recent death of her grandfather, the British actress had an unfortunate run-in with a knife while slicing bread: “I weirdly chopped the top of my finger off,” she says, able now to appreciate the absurdity of the situation. She returned home from the ER just before sunrise, her fingertip reattached and bandaged, and recorded her audition video. “In the tape, my eyes are glassy, and my face is all puffy,” she says.
Turns out, such a performance was just what the role of Josephina, a budding agency assistant who unearths a trove of paintings-and a deadly supernatural force-called for. Through a high-camp horror lens, Velvet Buzzsaw, the third offering from Oscar-nominated director Dan Gilroy, explores the conflict between creativity and commerce in L.A.’s art world. “It’s the most cutthroat world I’ve ever experienced,” says Ashton, 34. “There’s a lot of fear of not measuring up, not being on the cutting edge.”
For the past two years, Ashton has hosted the British late-night show Random Acts, a weekly celebration of avant-garde short films from the likes of Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic?. Her own short, 2017’s Meeting Lorraine O’Grady, premiered at London’s Tate Modern and profiled the titular American artist. “Art should be for everyone, not just the rich,” Ashton says. “It helps us form tools to live everyday life. Everyone deserves that.”
Velvet Buzzsaw’s supporting characters (played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Toni Collette, John Malkovich, Daveed Diggs, and Rene Russo) live to maniacal extremes. Josephina is the exception. She sits calmly, eerily, in the eye of the storm. “She’s 100 percent a Dan Gilroy creation,” says Ashton, citing Denzel Washington’s title role in Roman J. Israel, Esq. “His characters are the best kind of off-kilter people.”
Ashton’s parents, both former secondary-school teachers, enrolled her in acting classes at age six. (Her father taught English; her mother, a Ugandan immigrant, taught design technology.) Ashton broke into the national consciousness in 2011, playing the spiky antiestablishment teen Vod in the popular British sitcom Fresh Meat. Since then, she’s become something of a West End darling. The Telegraph lauded Ashton’s “star quality” in a 2016 production of The Maids, where she held her own opposite Uzo Aduba and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael. This month, she joins Chloe? Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in another horror flick, Greta. And next month, the multihyphenate releases her debut book, Character Breakdown, an experimental memoir about the effects of character creation-and destruction-on actors.
“Zawe’s mind always seems to be turning and whirring,” says Collette, who first met the actress on the set of last fall’s BBC One and Netflix series Wanderlust. Adds Gyllenhaal: “She’s that fierce combination of creator and performer, filled with contradictions: She is profoundly, deeply sure of herself and simultaneously ceaselessly wanting more, to go deeper,” he says. “At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I loved pretty much every moment working with her.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2019 issue of ELLE.
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