Embeth Davidtz has always been soft-spoken. Stepping up as a director, she decided to roar

Los Angeles Times

3 days ago

Embeth Davidtz's home is so quiet. Nestled in Brentwood Park, the 59-year-old actor's spacious yet cozy place feels like a sanctuary, the skylight in her kitchen offering plentiful afternoon sun. Once owned by Julie Andrews, the house is where Davidtz feels most comfortable. It's taken most of her life to find somewhere that made her feel that way.
'I seldom leave,' she says, smiling. 'I'm not someone who likes to run around. I like being here.'
She's lived in this house for about 20 years — it's where she and her husband raised their children, now 22 and 19. She moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and before then, hers was a completely different world. Lately, that world has rarely been far from her thoughts.
In the early 1970s, when Davidtz was eight years old, she moved from America with her South African parents to Pretoria, in the midst of that country's apartheid system. Long wanting to come to terms with the institutional racism she witnessed during her childhood, she has done something that previously had never held much interest: write and direct a movie. Pivoting from an on-screen career of stellar, precise performances in movies like 'Schindler's List,' 'Junebug' and 'Bridget Jones's Diary,' Davidtz has at last made a directorial debut with 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' (in theaters Friday), a gripping and somber drama based on Alexandra Fuller's acclaimed 2001 memoir about growing up in colonial Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film is about Fuller's family, but it's also very much about the lessons Davidtz never wants to stop learning herself.
'It's a constant processing,' she says of how she is always reckoning with her past. 'I think I'll probably have to grapple with it till the day that I die — what I remember seeing.'
Set in 1980, the year that the African region known as Rhodesia, ruled by a white minority, would become the independent nation of Zimbabwe, 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' features Davidtz as Nicola, an angry, alcoholic policewoman whose privileged life crumbles as the Zimbabwean War upends the country's racial power imbalance. However, the movie is not told from Nicola's perspective but instead, from that of Bobo, her 8-year-old daughter (played with beguiling immediacy by newcomer Lexi Venter), who reflects Fuller's own blinkered worldview at the time. As Bobo provides voice-over narration, we witness a disturbingly naturalized culture of colonialism in which our main character, a seemingly innocent child, bikes through town with a rifle slung on her back and parrots the racist attitudes espoused by white landowners around her.
Zimbabwe isn't South Africa, but when Davidtz read Fuller's stark memoir, the similarities of racial injustice were striking.
'She cuts you off at the knees,' says Davidtz. 'You recognize it, then you feel shame.'
Davidtz was born in Indiana, but after some time in New Jersey, her family moved to Pretoria when she was eight. Her 17 years in South Africa left their mark. Even though she'd never written a screenplay before 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight,' she had been working on something about her upbringing. But after reading Fuller's memoir, Davidtz says, 'I remember thinking, 'Well, that's the definitive book on it. I'm never going to be able to write a book like that.''
'I wouldn't say mine was a happy childhood,' she continues. 'I think it was very unhappy in ways. Did I love Africa? Yes. But was it an idyllic childhood? No.'
Bobo's bigoted views — the girl has come to believe Black people don't have last names and are secretly terrorists — weren't what Davidtz experienced growing up. 'My family didn't act that same way, they didn't speak that same way, but you were part of the system by being there,' she says.
Like Bobo's family, Davidtz did not enjoy many luxuries, except in comparison to the help around her. 'If you had servants in your home, you were part of the system,' she says. '[My parents] certainly were not out marching for civil rights. They fell in that gray area.'
Not that Davidtz excludes herself from the racist mindset that's evident in Bobo, who enjoys spending time with her family's housekeeper, Sarah (Zikhona Bali), despite treating her as beneath her. That relationship picked an emotional scab for Davidtz. 'There's uncomfortable memories that I have,' she admits. 'I remember playing with [Black] children and being bossy and being just an a—hole.'
Her personal connection to 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' goes deeper. Fuller's mother was a drinker; in Davidtz's family, it was her father, who studied applied mathematics and physics in the States. She sees his alcoholism as the byproduct of an idealism that got crushed.
'He was a physical chemist; he was a scientist,' she says, 'and his whole thought was this altruistic thing of, 'I'm going to take everything that I've learned and bring it back [to South Africa].' That's where the alcoholism emerged. That government that was running South Africa really tightly controlled everything that my father did. I think they were highly suspicious of somebody coming from America. He very much felt his wings were clipped. And so the bottle got raised.' (These days are happier ones for her dad: 'He's medicated; he's calmer,' she says. 'He doesn't drink anymore.')
Davidtz can't quite pinpoint where her passion for performing originated. 'No one else has it,' she says of her family. 'I really think that 7-year-old me sat in my living room in New Jersey watching the 'Sonny & Cher' show. Cher with that hair was just the most glamorous, amazing thing I'd ever seen. And then, suddenly, we land in this dirty, dusty farmhouse with my dad in decline and no television.'
Davidtz escaped Pretoria — at least in her mind — by going to the movies, including an early, formative screening of 'Doctor Zhivago,' David Lean's 1965 historical romance. 'My mind was blown by the sweep, the story, the epicness,' she recalls. 'Maybe I wanted, somehow, to remove myself from that dirt and squalor and aspire to something.'
'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' doesn't contain the gratuitous violence you often see in films about racism. In its place is a codified class structure ruled by its white characters, who strongly encourage the locals to vote for approved candidates in the upcoming election in order to maintain the status quo. But once revolutionary Robert Mugabe comes to power, that old system gives way, leading to an unsettling scene in which Nicola wields a whip to keep Black Africans off what she considers to be her farm.
The questionable optics of a white woman telling a story about Zimbabwe entered Davidtz's mind. She did her homework about the region, even though she ultimately had to shoot in South Africa because of Zimbabwe's current political unrest. She spoke with her cinematographer, Willie Nel, about how the film had to look.
'I need the light shining through her eyes like that,' Davidtz remembers. 'I want the closeup on the filthy fingernails. This is the way Peter Weir gets in super-close, how Malick [shows] skies and nature.' And she made sure to center her pessimistic coming-of-age narrative on the white characters, condemning them — including young Bobo.
'I don't think a Black filmmaker could tell the experience of a white child,' she says. 'I think only a white filmmaker could tell that. [Bobo] misunderstands a lot of what [the Black characters are] doing. That was deliberate — I tried to handle that really carefully. I'm certainly not trying to make the white child sympathetic in any way.'
She was just as adamant that Nicola be an utterly unlikable, virulent bigot. 'You needed her to be diabolical in order to show what really was happening there,' says Davidtz. 'I saw people behave like that.'
This isn't the first time she's played the villain, but she wanted to ensure there was nothing sympathetic or devilishly appealing about Nicola. Recalling her portrayal of the superficial, materialistic Mary Crawford in the 1999 adaptation of 'Mansfield Park,' Davidtz observes, 'She was just cheerfully going about her life — being diabolical, but with a smile. She was charming. That was more acceptable, more palatable.' She allowed none of that here, tapping into the desperation of a woman whose self-worth is wrapped up in the subjugation of those around her.
The veteran actress has often done terrific work by going small, her breakthrough coming as a Jewish maid prized by Ralph Fiennes' sadistic Nazi in 1993's 'Schindler's List.' More recently Davidtz has earned rave reviews in series like 'Ray Donovan' and 'The Morning Show.' She doesn't do showy and she's the same in person, appealingly modest and soft-spoken. But in 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight,' she gives a boldly brazen performance as Nicola, a portrait of ugly, entitled hatred. Although Davidtz felt anxious playing such a demonstratively racist character — especially around her Black cast — she also found it a refreshing change from how she usually approaches a role.
'This [performance] was hard and it was scary, but it was necessary,' she says, Getting herself to such a dark place for 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' was easy, though. The trick? 'I didn't have time,' she says. 'Everything was focused on only the three hours [a day] that I had with the kid. It was like, 'I got to get this quick,' and I was on my last nerve, which was great for the character — I was pretty worn down by the time we shot a lot of my stuff.'
Similarly to 'The Zone of Interest,' which Davidtz reveres ('I love that film,' she declares, awed), 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight' illustrates the insidiousness of bigotry by stripping away the simplistic moralizing. Bobo, her parents and the other white settlers benefit from an unjust system, always presented matter-of-factly, as the adults relish their domestic bliss at the expense of the indentured locals. I ask Davidtz if she's showing us what everyday evil looks like.
'Evil's a strong word,' she replies. 'I'd say 'oblivious' or 'unconscious' or 'culpable.' It's all of the above. I really wanted to reveal something the way 'The Zone of Interest' revealed something. It's the casual racism. An ordinary person watching [the film] goes, 'Oh, my God, that was normal to them. That was their normal.' Then you see the full picture. Then, the evil of it shows up.'
In her memoir, author Fuller writes about her later political awakening, a process Davidtz underwent as well. 'I saw moments around me — horrible, violent police arresting men on the streets, the people chucked into the back of police vans,' she says. 'Just that terrified feeling inside and knowing, 'If you're white, you're safe. If you're Black, you're not.' Then as I got older, [there was] the disconnect between what I'm seeing and what is right.'
According to Davidtz, 'the scales fell off' once she attended South Africa's liberal Rhodes University in the early 1980s and started taking part in protest marches. 'I felt like that was the big awakening,' she says, 'but it's an awakening that continues.'
There is one frequent sound in the calm oasis of Davidtz's home: the chatter of news broadcasts. 'It's often on in the background,' she says, 'but I think it's a habit that's eroding my peace of mind.' She admits to the same conflicted feelings many in Los Angeles have, a desire to stay informed of everything that's happening — the ongoing war in Gaza, the stories out of Ukraine, the violent ICE raids in Southern California — but not succumb to despair and anger. No amount of quiet can tune out the world, and Davidtz doesn't want to.
'When you've been in a place where things have been so wrong, you spot it really quickly in other places,' she says of the injustices occurring both here and abroad. 'One thing that we can do is say what we think.' Remembering her own childhood, and pondering what prompted her to make this movie, she suggests, 'I think it comes from watching something silently for a long time. I think that part of me will never want to not say, 'I don't think this is right.''
With 'Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight,' Davidtz is speaking up, but she knows those bad old days aren't over. In fact, they've never been so present. As the film ends, Bobo takes one last look at the town and the locals that shaped her. There's a glimmer of hope that, one day, this girl will outgrow the racism she's ingested. But the land — and the pain — remains. Davidtz has not allowed herself to look away.