Cynthia Erivo is contemplating her favourite crisps, the ridged American brand Ruffles, as we sit talking in a quiet corner of a west London restaurant. Dressed all in black and sporting her signature elongated nails, she is known for her healthy lifestyle, but everyone, it seems, has their vices. Before her concert, there was the Dior front row at Paris fashion week, and she has just been announced as a guest host on SNL UK.
Erivo doesn’t drink alcohol (today she orders some peppermint tea); she’s vegan; she doesn’t eat airline food, only her own prepacked meals. She even has an infra-red sauna “to help me heal from the inside”. Earlier this year she ran the London Marathon before jumping on stage to perform Dracula, where she played all 23 parts; she had rehearsed her lines while going on gruelling marathon training runs.
All that requires discipline – and snacks – to keep the show on the road. She has flown in this morning to promote her new film, the legal drama Prima Facie, an adaptation of the one-woman Suzie Miller play about sexual assault, in which Jodie Comer wowed audiences in 2022. Erivo bristles when I ask if she was hesitant about picking up a role so associated with someone else.
The pair actually met at a fashion dinner and spoke about the role – “Not asking any tips or anything” – and Erivo insists she was always going to make Tessa her own. Tessa knows how to dance around the courtroom – and the victim – raising inconsistencies that mean convicting a man “beyond reasonable doubt” becomes almost impossible. When Tessa is raped by a colleague, her world implodes and it’s made clear just how brutal the British justice system can be for women, who, according to Rape Crisis, have a one in four chance of being sexually assaulted, while only 2.7% of reported rapes result in charges being brought.
Miller, a former barrister herself, said the inspiration for the story came from her realisation that: “It’s almost impossible to actually run a sexual assault case and win it.” Tessa, says Erivo, doesn’t see how hard it is for anyone to recall traumatic events in detail, or how lopsided the system is, until it’s swallowing her whole. I think it’s only then she realises what she’s been asking other people to do – when it comes to recall – is actually impossible.” Is Erivo hopeful the film can have a lasting impact? If a person doesn’t say yes, they don’t say yes.
If the body language doesn’t say yes, they don’t say yes.” Tessa’s rise through the legal ranks as a working-class Black woman mirrors Erivo’s ascent through the West End, Broadway and Hollywood. After arriving at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada), Erivo had to traverse a strange world, deeply rooted in tradition and privilege that she wasn’t exposed to growing up in south London. When I ask Erivo what it was like navigating that space she gives a one-word answer: “Hard.” She held down three jobs, including working every imaginable role at the Stratford East theatre, while classmates with means simply had to turn up.
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