Noma dumezweni biography examples

When I started working on my novel in 2015, I knew it needed to be be about Egyptians. I wanted the book to follow Egyptians like me, who were raised in America, their family’s culture often clashing with American values. Up to that point, I hadn’t read too many stories like that—and none about Egyptians, specifically. So I sat down and began to brainstorm, taking what I knew from my own upbringing and background and setting it to paper.

A majority of the stories I’d read in my lifetime featured white characters or characters presumed to be white. Growing up, I think I’d always wanted to be white. My Barbies with their long, blonde hair were white, the characters I watched on TV were white, and, unfortunately, most of my friends were white. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this ever-present whiteness seeped into my mind so deeply that for me, a brown girl from Egypt, white became the default, and I was the other. I devoured books as a kid, starting with The Babysitter’s Club until I graduated to Nancy Drew novels, then by middle school Agatha Christie books, onto Harry Potter, and the list keeps going. In my mind, I pictured the characters as pale-skinned, looking nothing like me.

In my defense, the book covers of The Babysitter’s Club and Nancy Drew featured white girls, and The Babysitter’s Club made a point of Claudia Kishi’s Japanese-American identity, unlike the rest of the girls in the group. In the other texts, though, the whiteness was all of my own making. Nowhere in Harry Potter does J.K. Rowling define Hermione as a white girl, and in fact, Noma Dumezweni, a Black girl, was cast as Hermione in the original 2016 performance of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.

But growing up, I

While walking through Borough Market one day, she ran into an old friend, Benedict Wong. He updated her on his life. “He said his old agents [weren’t] working for him as an East Asian actor—always being put in these boxes—and they just made one mistake too many so he had to let them go,” she says. “He could see I was [questioning] the business, and he said, ‘Just hold onto your art…. You need to come out of yourself and look at all the work you’ve done.’” Dumezweni found inspiration to persevere. So, jump-cut to a little over a year ago, when Dumezweni and Wong ran into each other again. “He said, ‘I’ve finally got agents again,’” she recalls. “I went, ‘Shut the fuck up.’… Watching his lovely gorgeousness in the Marvel world, I freaked out—like, ‘What? You’ve only just done it?’”

When Dumezweni got Cursed Child in 2016, her life changed. She had to navigate the exposure, initially quite ugly, of being a Black actress taking on a role previously cast as white. J.K. Rowling strongly defended the decision at the time on social media, a major show of support that Dumezweni felt from the author throughout. “I really like Jo, the person I’ve met a few times,” she says. When asked about Rowling’s more recent public comments about gender, widely criticized as transphobic, Dumezweni strongly defends queer rights, saying, “The trans conversation has now become the bogeyman for any [political] excuse,” but demurs beyond that: “I cannot speak to the trans conversation in relation to J.K. I can speak to my love for the stories.” 

However, she says of Max’s upcoming HarryPotter series, “For me that’s too soon. It’s too soon! We need another generation. It’s almost like the kids have got to be grandparents for the TV series to come out again.” She has a burner Twitter account, through which she gauged reactions to the recent announcement of the show: “Looking at that conversation of ‘Is Hermione going to be Black? What’s canon?’—that’s why it’s too close. It

Actress Noma Dumezweni has made her mark in several TV and film appearances including Doctor Who, Mary Poppins Returns, The Kid Who Would Be King, and most recently, as Hugh Grant’s powerful lawyer on HBO’s The Undoing. Next up, she will be taking on a brand new role in Disney’s live-action The Little Mermaid.

Deadline reports that Dumezweni’s character is unknown for now, but confirmed it is a character that did not appear in the original animated film. Halle Bailey will portray Ariel, a mermaid princess who dreams of being a human, while Melissa McCarthy is playing her evil aunt Ursula. Javier Bardem is on board to play King Triton, with Daveed Diggs set to play Sebastian and Awkwafina set as Scuttle.

The Little Mermaid will be directed by Rob Marshall and is written by David Magee. The upcoming film will incorporate original songs from the 1989 animated classic, as well as new music from original composer Alan Menken with lyrics by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

It is hardly surprising that 20 years after apartheid ended South Africans find de Kock, at 65 living out his life in prison, a shocking figure.

From the early 1980s he ran the police counterinsurgency unit which hunted down those the state wanted to eliminate.

It was a ruthless death squad doing a job de Kock thought justified to safeguard the white-dominated society he had grown up in.

De Kock was found guilty on 89 charges, including murder. He has said he took no pleasure in arranging the bombings and kidnappings and acts of torture: he was acting on orders.

As the play shows, he resents that he may spend the rest of his life in jail whereas politicians of the apartheid era and some senior officers escaped by saying the right things to South Africa's post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Noma Dumezweni, born in Swaziland, plays Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the academic who interviewed de Kock for some 40 hours and who wrote the book on which the play is based. "It's interesting that Pumla now prefers not to talk of forgiveness but empathy," she says.

"If through Pumla's work we can understand the society that created de Kock that's a real achievement. It's too easy just to assume he was a monster and Nick Wright's script doesn't do that."