My grandfather was the king of a region in western Nigeria, where I had the privilege to live for seven years while growing up. But what we think of as royalty in the U.K. is very different to royalty in Nigeria: if you were to throw a stone there, you would hit about 30 princes.

If you look at your companies, and half of your staff are not female, and a decent percentage of them are not people of color, then you are part of the problem because you need people working for you and you need people in positions of leadership who can exercise their bias and who can exercise their perspective.

We can't afford to deny our past in a bid to be empowered. But what we can do is contextualize the past.

What I try to do with my career as an actor is what I've learned in the theater: I am rigorous with myself as to whether I'm telling the truth, and I try to surround myself with filmmakers and content creators who are also interested in the pursuit of the truth.

Movies these days have made killers into funny people. What's that all about? I've got kids and family and friends, and I don't like bad things. I don't think they're funny, and it's irresponsible to make movies that don't show you how that's not good.

It used to just be a SAG card, and then you got an AFTRA card. I got my AFTRA card doing a commercial in Atlanta. I got my SAG card doing a beer commercial from 100 years ago; it was one of the first national commercials with a family in it that was black and normal, and I played the daughter.

If you're a person of faith that is conservative, that's pro-life, as I am, that believes strongly in traditional family values, as I do... then how we talk about them matters.

My parents divorced. There was the usual awkward business of going between them, but I was mostly with my mother. She remarried to a Greek painter Nico Ghika, so we were always around artists and intellectuals.