The Fresh Meat star on working in a cinema in Hackney, growing up on British television and moving to LA next year
Zawe Ashton shows me the flip-down seat at the back of the Rio cinema in Hackney, east London, where she spent several years sitting in the dark. "The first film I ushered was Lynne Ramsay's Morvern Callar," says the 27-year-old actress, soon to appear in a new series of Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat. "I started at 18. Best job in the world. Blockbusters, indie films, classic matinees. I remember watching City of God three times a day for a fortnight. Anyone who's been an usher knows it's a training in resilience. But you get such a film education. And the popcorn's free."
She grew up a few roads away, the daughter of a mum from Uganda (her name, pronounced "Zow-ee", is Ugandan) and an English dad, both teachers before her father moved to work in TV. Ashton has acted since she was small, taking an early role as a road-crosser in a 90s episode of Desmond's (that week's storyline involved Porkpie becoming a lollipop man). She's been a writer since she was a teen, too, winning the UK Slam! poetry championship in 2000, going on to write prize-listed plays. "I've always known that I didn't want to be at the mercy of the phone ringing [for acting work]. If one day my face turns blue, I don't want suddenly to not be in the industry."
She's holding on. In Fresh Meat, a terrific, low-key comedy about student freshers that began last year, Ashton plays Vod, a slacker and habitual tenner-borrower who, in the new series, "finally gets a job". Last spring, she was in a Michael Frayn play, Here, at the Rose in Kingston and starred in Carol Morley's 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life. The film explored the life and death of Joyce Carol Vincent, whose decomposed body was found in her London flat in 2006, around three years after her death; Ashton played Vincent, silently and to some acclaim, in the documentary's re-enactment scenes.
Tall and pretty, a chuckler with a sly wit, Ashton worries she's never quite matched the job satisfaction she got from that young gig on Desmond's, her favourite TV show at the time. "I peaked. Oh! I peaked. Age eight." The future should still be interesting. She's just returned from Los Angeles, "doing a recce", inquiring into possible work. And? "I met a lot of people, got some smoke blown up my... blown where smoke is sometimes blown." She expects to move out there next year.
I'm about to say, hey, if all goes well one of her films might come to the cinema where things began for her. But that already happened when Dreams of a Life was put on. "And before that they showed one of my more classic film appearances." She refers to the little-loved St Trinian's 2, which was on at the Rio for a week in 2010.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/sep/30/zawe-ashton-fresh-meat-interview
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