Thandie Newton doesn’t want her children to become actors.
The 45-year-old actress has Ripley, 17, Nico, 13, and Booker, four, with her husband Ol Parker, and although her daughter Nico is set to start in Tim Burton’s live-action remake of Disney’s ‘Dumbo’, Thandie has admitted it was a career choice that she tried to steer her brood away from.
She said: "I think a lot of people desperately want their kids to get involved, and I tried to steer them away from it. Well, I obviously steered her right towards it, but I just think it’s a really difficult profession. There’s so much rejection, there’s so much competition, especially between women. It’s a really really tough place to be."
The ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ actress took her children on set with her, and says that they spent so much time sat around watching their mother work that they lost interest in the magic of show business.
She added: "They spent so much time with me on set that for them it’s like, ‘Meh! Whatever’. They were bored all the time, I was the one saying ‘Please come and see mummy doing this!’ and they were like ‘Oh but you do the same thing over and over.’ So for them it just lost the allure."
Thandie’s daughter Nico fell into acting by accident after casting directors found her YouTube channel at the age of 11, and after turning down one job because she didn’t want to lock lips with an older boy, the youngster landed herself the role in ‘Dumbo’.
Speaking during an appearance on ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’, the ‘Westworld’ star said: "I got a call from this casting director in the states, saying they’d seen my daughter on YouTube and would she be interested in auditioning for a movie. So we recorded her in the kitchen and the director adored her. Nico was nonplussed about the whole thing but when she learned she’d have to kiss a 16-year-old boy in the movie she was like ‘I’m not doing that’. So that was that.
"And then back in England it happened again. A casting director had heard that she’d been pretty luminous in this screen test, and it was Tim Burton’s ‘Dumbo’. And as soon as my kid heard about ‘Dumbo’ and Tim Burton she was like ‘Yes!’. So we recorded her on the iPhone again and Tim fell in love with her. And that is history."
Thandie Newton steers kids away from acting
