Meet Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton, the brilliant stars of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s sweeping portrait of an interracial couple fıghting for their right to marry in 1950s Vırginia.
We enter the story in 1958, in rural Virginia. A woman and a man stand in an open field of grass; she is telling him she is pregnant. There is a hint of worry in her luminous dark eyes, but the man assures her that they will get married and build a home together. The opening scene of Loving, Jeff Nichols’s quietly devastating new film, feels less like a beginning and more like a happily-ever-after ending. But because this is 1950s Virginia, and the woman is black and the man is white, the story does not unfold in the way of fairy tales. For Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving—a real-life couple played in the film by Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton—the seemingly straightforward act of getting married becomes a dangerous and transgressive act.
With its lush cinematography, Loving is a visual paean to the 1950s, but it is also a fierce interrogation of the hypocrisies of that era. It traces the arc of the Lovings’ struggle to live as husband and wife at a time not so long ago when it was illegal in sixteen states to marry someone of a different race. As the Lovings are forced to leave their tight-knit, working-class community and live in Washington, D.C., around them swirls language that evokes the present debate on gay marriage. “It’s God’s law,” the sheriff tells the couple after their harrowing middle-of-the-night arrest. “A robin’s a robin, a sparrow is a sparrow.” As Edgerton says, “That’s the double beauty of the film. It’s a racial period piece, but it also echoes very loudly today.”
Negga gives a radiant and haunting performance as Mildred, transforming from a country girl everyone calls Stringbean into an accidental activist—an unwitting righter of history’s wrongs. “Her quiet evolution was so touching to me,” says the actress, who was born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and an Irish mother. “To have that kind of hope in an atmosphere of threat and fear.”
That’s the double beauty of the film,” says Edgerton. “It’s a racial period piece, but it also echoes very loudly today
Audiences will recognize the actress for her supporting role in the sci-fi feature Warcraft and her starring role as Tulip O’Hare on AMC’s Preacher, which has just been greenlighted for another season. But with Loving, and the early Oscar buzz around her performance, she is on the cusp of a whole other level of stardom. For her, the subject of the movie was highly personal. When she was around four, she moved with her family from Ethiopia to Ireland. County Limerick was more pastoral than suburban then, and Negga says she deeply identifies with Mildred’s sense of connection to a place. “Virginia isn’t that different from Ireland,” she says. “Land and home and community are superimportant. When I was playing her, I tried to imagine I couldn’t go home again because of whom I married. It must have drained the lifeblood from her.” She also related to Mildred’s dawning racial awareness. “When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people. I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute. I didn’t experience racism there. The first time I did was in London. It was that moment that you realize you’re black. A kind of lifting of the veil.”
Edgerton, who has made a career of playing tough, lonely antiheroes, finds pathos in the role of Richard, who is as guarded as he is devoted to his wife. To capture the taciturn construction worker, the 42-year-old Australian actor bleached his hair, adopted a receding hairline, and wore prosthetic teeth. “I was thinking the whole time how he must have felt as a man, that he had led the woman he loved into trouble,” he says. The real Richard was uncomfortable in the role of activist, but he was never ambivalent about the woman he’d chosen to marry. “How easy the door out of that marriage would have been,” Edgerton says. “It was a door he never thought to go through.”
Loving is Nichols’s fifth feature. He’s a Southern white man taking on race and history—in a year when these themes have embroiled the nation. “The last thing I want to be is defensive,” Nichols says on a hot August afternoon in his modest studio in Austin, Texas, not far from the home he shares with his wife, Missy, and their six-year-old, Sam. “Germany has spent a long time coming to terms with its horrors—but in America we’ve never really faced the horrors of slavery and everything that came in its wake. It’s like a wound. Sunlight has to get in there for it to heal.”
A youthful, sandy-haired 37, Nichols is preppily dressed in khakis, a navy polo, and loafers without socks. His previous films include the coming-of-age story Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey, and Midnight Special, a sci-fi thriller that also starred Edgerton. “All of my films have been written and imagined in the South,” he says with a slight Arkansas twang. “I wanted to portray the Southerners I recognized from growing up. I didn’t want to portray them in this horrifying, cartoonish way.”
His studio is stripped down—a desk, a computer, posters of John Carpenter’s Starman and Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. Hanging beside his desk is a gift from McConaughey—a framed photograph of a boat perched in a tree from the set of Mud, with a plaque that says, well, you wrote it.
Nichols grew up in Little Rock—his father owned a furniture store; his mother was a homemaker—and remains close to his two older brothers (their initials are tattooed on his forearm around a clover). He went to the same Little Rock high school that was notorious for race riots during the 1950s school-integration efforts. The mythology of the civil rights movement, he says, “was invoked in every school assembly.”
Still, when a producer sent him the 2011 HBO documentary The Loving Story, directed by Nancy Buirski, he had never heard of the case. It’s already lore that his wife told him, “If you don’t make this movie, I’m going to divorce you.” But Nichols’s way in was through his maternal grandparents, rural people in whom he recognized the same stoicism as he saw in the Lovings.
Nichols never went to film school. “I couldn’t afford it—and I was young and antsy and wanted to make films out of the gate.” As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, he found his coterie, the same small group with whom he still collaborates. Raymond Carver and William Faulkner were as much influences on him as the movies he saw with his father at the Dome Theatre in Little Rock: Lawrence of Arabia, Jaws, Fletch. When asked about his favorite cinematic era, he says, “If I was being honest, the eighties. If I was trying to sound smart, the seventies. If I really thought about it, the sixties.” Nichols’s expansive visual storytelling feels more in sync with Spielberg than with the grungier digital aesthetic of his indie-filmmaking peers.
I wasn’t looking for star power,” says Nichols. “I was looking for great actors
Loving, the director says, is his most “precise” film to date. “I wanted to get everything right. If I needed to do four more takes, I would do four more takes.” He did a huge amount of research. “Jeff created one of the best gelled-together worlds I’ve seen—like a window into time,” says Edgerton.
“Jeff saw this as the most beautiful love story in the world that’s never been told,” says Negga, who was the first person Nichols auditioned. At first he thought she was too petite. But then, he says, “she spoke in Mildred’s voice. She held her mouth like Mildred.” He didn’t even know she was Irish until he talked to her afterward. “I wasn’t looking for star power,” he says. “I was looking for great actors.” Negga and Edgerton movingly capture the ordinary tenderness between a husband and wife. When asked about their chemistry, Nichols says, “Joel and Ruth liked each other.”
Nichols was intent on verisimilitude: “I didn’t feel comfortable making things up with this story—the jail was the same jail they stayed in. The front shot of the courthouse was the same courthouse.” The couple’s younger son, Donald, and their baby were played by relatives of the real Mildred. He also brought on the Lovings’ only surviving child, Peggy, as a consultant. “Peggy was tough. She was there, watching the scene where they were passing around plates of food over dinner. She said, straight-faced, ‘Well, you got that wrong.’ Then she started laughing. She had an interesting sense of humor.”
The climactic scene in Loving could have taken place solely in the courtroom, but for one thing—the Lovings weren’t there. Nichols used their absence to his advantage, telling the story of that day from the periphery. The couple spent those hours at home, Mildred sewing and cooking, Richard laying bricks and mowing the lawn. The children are shown playing in the yard out front. Earlier, when the lawyers ask Richard if there is anything he’d like to tell the Supreme Court before their trial, he says simply, “Tell the judge I love my wife.” (It’s Negga’s favorite line in the film.) As the camera moves between their family life and the courtroom, the divide between the powerful and the powerless has rarely been laid out so starkly. Here is the Supreme Court trying to decide whether this couple and their children should exist, while far from the grand white steps of the courthouse, they are busy existing. As Edgerton says, “It is a sad happy ending because they win, but nobody can give them back those years.”
Loving v. Virginia once and for all invalidated laws prohibiting interracial marriage in this country. “There was an inevitability to that couple,” says Negga. “They were like the poster couple for the future.”]]>
