Why Naomie Harris Asked Child Actor to Leave Set During 'Moonlight' Outburst Scene

Naomie Harris had vowed never to play a crack addict, but it was a vow she had to break when she received the script for Barry Jenkins’s coming-of-age drama Moonlight. The decision has worked out well for the amiable 40-year-old English actress best known for 28 Days Later and the Daniel Craig Bond movies. Harris has received the best reviews of her career for the acclaimed film, along with her first Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award nominations, and a probable Oscar nod on the horizon.

One thing Harris wouldn’t do, however, is subject her youngest costar to her harsh outbursts targeting his character. “I asked for Alex [Hibbert, the youngest of three actors who play the main character, Chiron, a.k.a. Little, at various stages in his life] to be removed from set when I did the yelling,” Harris told Yahoo Movies (watch above). “I just thought, ‘I know he’s 11 years old and I know he knows about acting, but I don’t know if he has the emotional resources to kind of deal with that. It’s really difficult at that age. So he wasn’t around when I did the yelling.”

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Harris should know. She started acting at 9, and as a preteen appeared in the U.K. television series Simon and the Witch, Erasmus Microman, and Runaway Bay before landing a starring role in the teen-centric sci-fi program The Tomorrow People.

As she matured, Harris set a person goal to avoid playing a crack addict — a role she viewed as a Hollywood stereotype. She only relented when Jenkins explained to her that her character, Paula, was based not on a plot contrivance but on reality, an amalgam of his own mother and the mother of Tarell Alvin McCraney, who wrote the unproduced play Moonlight is based on.

Related: Meet Barry Jenkins, the Maverick Filmmaker Behind the Acclaimed New Indie ‘Moonlight’

“The interesting thing for me on that journey was that I realized I had a lot of judgment that I didn’t realize was there,” Harris said. “I had to overcome my own judgment of what it means to be a crack addict and discover that in fact, we are all dealing with some form of addiction. Because all addiction is is wanting to escape and numb your pain. We all have emotional pain, we’re just dealing with it in different ways.”

Moonlight is now in theaters.