Following My Heart

Actress Nambitha Ben-Mazwi says giving up her corporate career is the best move she’s ever made.

- Shanaaz Prince

SHE wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. After all, how many people can say a Hollywood superstar has given them their phone number with an open invitation to hook up if they’re ever in town? 

Nambitha Ben-Mazwi didn’t know what to make of it when Laurence Fishburne told her to give him a call the next time she was in Tinseltown. They’d got on well on the set of TV mini-series Madiba, which was shot in South Africa early last year, but when she made a trip to Los Angeles a few months later she wasn’t sure whether to take him up on his offer.

“When an A-lister says you must holler, you don’t take it seriously,” Nambitha says. “I didn’t even know if the number was real or whether he was just being polite.” 

So after sending him a message she was amazed when he responded.

“He called me and asked me to send him my location pin. He rocked up in his Aston Martin and picked me up and we went to a Whole Foods [Market – a US health food chain] of all places.

“We were grocery shopping in Whole Foods and I asked him, ‘What’s up?’ and he was like, ‘I’m gonna cook and you’re gonna eat’. It just felt like he was my second uncle or an older brother, it was just so relaxed.

“He really treated me well, we went to his house, I met his wife and his younger daughter and we had a braai.”