Queen hereafter

Ruth Negga has already conquered Hollywood. Now, making her Broadway debut as theater’s most misunderstood woman, she’s after a different crown.

- HANNA FLINT

“We assume because something has been done many times that it has been done every possible way,” Ruth Negga says. “I don’t know if that’s necessarily true.”

We’re speaking here of Lady Macbeth. No character has ever earned quite so much bad press. Her name has become synonymous with every insult you could level at a woman near a man in power. And right now, as the world navigates Shakespearean levels of threat, the Macbeths’ story of power, ambition, and regicide has never felt more vital. (Or ubiquitous: In recent months Joel Coen delivered The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring Frances McDormand, and a stage version starring Saoirse Ronan stunned London.)

Before Negga’s move into Glamis Castle—or, more precisely, Broadway’s Longacre Theatre, where she’ll star opposite Daniel Craig as the much-maligned character in director Sam Gold’s production of Macbeth, beginning in late March—she escaped from cold England and went to Los Angeles, and today she’s wrapped in a gray cardigan, almost as if the chill of my London flat were beaming through her computer screen. Over the last few weeks she has been enjoying what she calls “time to gently refill and refuel” before she begins what is sure to be one of the most challenging roles of her career.