Ruth Negga is currently promoting the new season of Preacher, which is how she ended up on the current issue of The Edit. I like Ruth so much, but I often find her interviews to be pretty boring, so I was surprised that this Edit interview actually had some interesting quotes. For those of you who don’t know her background, she’s half-Ethiopian and she was raised in Ireland. She currently lives in London, although she’s on location with boyfriend and costar Dominic Cooper a lot of the time. Ruth and Dominic have been together for eight years! And she’s thinking about babies. And a lot of other stuff. You can read her Edit interview here. Some highlights:

She brought her cousin David to the Oscars this year: “We made a pact when we were seven years old. We were absolutely convinced that one of us would win an Oscar – we thought it was like applying for a driving license; you just asked for it. I said if I won I’d take him, and he said if he won he’d take me.”

She didn’t realize actors actually “campaigned” for awards: “I didn’t even realize there was a campaign. I thought you just crossed your fingers and hoped for the best. I was so naïve. You have to do luncheons, screenings, Q&As – it’s intense… Imagine if I wasn’t that hot on my film.”

How Meryl Streep name-checked her in her (Meryl’s) Globes speech: “That was surreal. There was a camera right beside me, so I had to try and stay calm. What I really wanted to do was scream, ‘Are you f***ing kidding me? Rewind. Say it again, Meryl, we couldn’t hear it at the back.’”

Working with Dominic Cooper: “It would be so lonely if he wasn’t there,. People say, ‘Never go out with an actor.’ But if you were with someone with a normal job, and one of you had to go away, how would that work?”

The actor’s life: “I get intimidated by wardrobes. I’m really good now at operating out of one suitcase, and I get overwhelmed by having anything more than that.”

She loves her stylist, Karla Welch: “She’s a huge feminist, and that was important. I don’t have time to go to the gym, and she dresses my body in a way that’s going to give me confidence. I like a sleeve, I like a high neck, that’s my style. And I am gently stubborn about being shoehorned into something that I am not.”

When someone stops her to tell her how much ‘Loving’ meant to them: “It makes me cry when people say that, and it happens quite a lot. I didn’t realize the extent to which it would have an impact on people. When you live in London or New York and you exist in this creative atmosphere, where 95% of people are liberal and forward-thinking, you don’t [understand how bad it still is for some people]. Certainly, I didn’t realize that it can still be so taboo in some communities, that people can be made to feel uncomfortable walking down the street holding hands.”

Whether she wants kids: “Oh, most definitely, yes. By the time you’re in a great relationship, it’s like, oh, I’m 35. S***. So there is part of your thinking that is: Do I want kids? When? If? How? No [I haven’t decided to have kids yet]… But it’s there, all the time, preoccupying me. And that’s not being an actor, it’s being a woman. I don’t know what [job] really creates a safe space for a woman to have time out, prolong the human race, and return to work in a very supportive way.”

She hates social media: “Instagram and Twitter, I don’t engage with any of it – it terrifies the s*** out of me. And I’ve never been on Facebook, ever. What that means is that I’m always the last to find something out, and my friendship group is very small, but, I would hope, committed. We’ll see, anyway, after me abandoning them all for about a year.”

[From The Edit]

HBO has been playing Loving a lot and I keep watching it over and over, and I even saw it in the theater last year! It’s a really great movie and I hope more people see it and discover it, because it’s a little gem of a film. It’s still worth saying: this happened in recent history. Loving v. Virginia was settled by the Supreme Court in 1967. There were anti-miscegenation laws on the books in many states that late into the 20th century in America. And yes, there are parts of the country – and not all of them in the deep South – where it’s still a big deal that an interracial couple holds hands in public.

Photos courtesy of The Edit.