Thembisa Mdoda-Nxumalo on helping families in 'Icebo Labantu' and motherhood
Her compassionate heart speaks as loud as her professional achievements.
Thembisa Liyema Mdoda-Nxumalo (42) is a talented South African television presenter and radio personality known for her captivating presence and engaging storytelling style.
Thembisa is set to bring hope and support to families in need through hosting Mzansi Magaic's new show 'Icebo Labantu,' a show lending a helping hand to families who have lost loved ones and don't have means of burying them.
In an interview with DRUM, Thembisa shared what she's most looking forward to about the show's launch and what she thinks audiences will respond to most.
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"I think what I'm looking forward to mostly is the element of humanity and helping people. I think we've lost touch with that because everybody's on the go. Everybody's trying to survive and make money. Everybody's trying to make sure their kids don't get sick, and they get to work on time, and they make sure that they cook before loadshedding comes. A lot is happening where we withdraw and go back into ourselves because a lot of people are going through a lot of things. So, I'm really looking forward to going back to that element of humanity, that element of helping people and that element of bringing hope back into South African homes. I like that I can leave this earth knowing that I've touched so many lives in so many different ways," she said.
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Thembisa believes that it is the values her mom taught her inform her approach to hosting the show.
"I think I'd have to go back to really my mom's values, mottos and mantras. She was such a selfless person, she was very career-driven, but at the end of the day, she remained selfless. And her phone would ring all the time with people and friends who want to just talk, or, my aunts and uncles who just need her to listen or to help or give advice. And if she could do something in whatever situation, she would just get up and do it. And I think as I get older, I find that open and earnest relationships are more valuable."
She says she has learnt to be selfless and prioritise the future of her children and their legacy.
"As I get older, I realise that it's not really about me anymore, it's about what my children are going to be left with in terms of what I'm teaching them. So, shows like these are incredibly important for me to do because then it allows me to use the platform and the art that I studied for to help other people, not just my pockets. One the biggest reason I took on the show is that this is something that I said I would do as soon as I entered into this industry. And I think OPW was one of those shows that did that. And I like that we go to the people, find out what they need, and I then take down the entire world with 'Icebolethu' and we find a solution."
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There's always room for improvement or learning, and Thembisa hopes the show also leaves her with something fruitful and educational on both professional and personal levels.
"Funerals are so final, we don't really get time to heal through a lot of things. So, I'm really hoping to take away healing from this experience. I think just the human impact something like this has on us and on families. I'm always willing to learn and be a sponge from people that I've never worked with. Like, I've never worked with Legend Manqele. I've always wanted to work with him, and I finally get to work with him, as 'The Bar group' is also producing the show. I'm hoping to learn from him, especially on the production side, especially on just how you navigate something like this. Because it's very difficult, to come into people's homes, into their personal spaces and say, we want to help."
"I took on the show because I noticed that people in my industry, especially icons that we've worked with, legends that we grew up watching, aren't able to even bury themselves when they pass. There used to be a 'donate this,' 'Go fund this,' for a leader in our industry. So, what I'm really wanting to push with 'Icebo Labantu', is a way forward for artists not to be in those positions anymore.
"We are all freelancers in this industry. We don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, but at least with this show, with 'Icebolethu,' we are then able to start a movement. And I think this is why the show is called 'Icebo Labantu,' it's starting a movement, a movement where you can help. Even if it's not done by this show, at least if we do it and pay it forward somehow. I think we should start a movement to get back to humanity," she clarified.
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Thembisa also believes that 'Icebo Labantu' can inspire a broader cultural shift in how we approach death and mourning in our society.
"I think that the show will inspire people to rally around each other, it will inspire communities to come together. And not to say that's not happening now, but more of it will happen. And it will also take away the shame of not being able to contribute financially. There are certain things where someone's like, 'you know what, my heart is broken, I can't right now.' And then someone else steps in. It will take away the shame of asking for help."
As a mother, outside of being a public figure, she wants to instill values of authenticity to her children and to teach them to never try to fit in in spaces but be who she has raised them to be.
"I want them to be themselves and then fight for themselves in every situation and every aspect of their lives because once you find who you are, you find your purpose and then you become very comfortable in who you are and in being yourself. These are the years that they have to do that. Then once they start their journey into becoming the people that they see themselves become, you fight tooth and nail for that. You don't want to walk into spaces and pretend to be something else because you think that's what they want. That is when you begin to play for the crowd and then you begin to listen to what they have to say about you instead of listening to yourself. So, find yourself and who you are, be that person and then fight tooth and nail for that person."
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5 days ago
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Embeth Davidtz says Spielberg, Altman influenced her directorial debut
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UPI
5 days ago
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Embeth Davidtz says Spielberg, Altman influenced her directorial debut
1 of 5 | Embeth Davidtz, seen at the 2017 American Cinematheque Awards in Beverly Hills, Calif., adapted, directed and stars in "Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight." File Photo by Jim Ruymen/UPI | License Photo LOS ANGELES, July 11 (UPI) -- Embeth Davidtz makes her screenwriting and directing debut in the film adaptation of Alexandra Fuller's memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, in theaters Friday. As an actor on screen since 1989, Davidtz drew on memories of working with directors like Steven Spielberg in Schindler's List and Robert Altman in The Gingerbread Man while making the feature. In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Davidtz, 59, said she realized she'd been learning from Spielberg and other filmmakers when she stepped behind the camera herself. "I watched Steven set up a shot and be very exacting and specific with his actors," Davidtz said. "I watched Robert Altman move a camera. He had such a beautiful loose style." Davidtz optioned Fuller's book, which chronicles life in Zimbabwe before and after the 1980 election. Her goal was to hire a writer and director, but when she couldn't, decided to take on both roles herself. In her screenplay, Davidtz zeroed in on the portion of the book when 8-year-old Bobo (Lexi Vinter) is living on her parents' farm in Rhodesia, the former Zimbabwe. As the country's 1980 prime minister election approaches, in which Robert Mugabe would defeat Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, Bobo has grown up apprehensive of Black Africans. Directing 8-year-old Lexi also reminded Davidtz of making the 1996 adaptation of Matilda. "Even Danny DeVito's dealing with a child, he was so beautiful with how he worked with Mara Wilson," she said "I think I was taking in things that helped me as a director long before I ever thought of directing something." Bobo's perspective was the only version of the story Davidtz felt comfortable telling as a White South African herself. Bobo talks about watching out for "terrorists," and bosses around the children of her parents' Black employees, because she learned the behavior. "It's not something she made up," Davidtz said. "That gives you the background to the family that she lives in and the society that she lives in." Davidtz also researched the Shona tribe of Zimbabwe, which factors into the story. She credits actors Zikhona Bali and Shilubana Fumani, both South African, with helping her steer potentially volatile scenes between Black and White characters. It also pleased Davidtz to see that behaving like a child of racist White Rhodesians was foreign to Lexi, who lives in modern South Africa. "She doesn't experience South Africa that way now," Davidtz said. "She said, 'Why do they treat them like that?' Which I thought was really actually hopeful to me that she's grown up in a much more integrated place than I did." Davidtz was a teenager in 1980 and living in South Africa following the Zimbabwe election. That is why she related to Fuller's book. "They were in a war which South Africa was not, but there was a lot of violence around us, a lot of oppression and suppression, people pulled off streets and state of emergencies being declared," she said. "Nelson Mandela was locked up that whole time. Anybody like him was either killed or locked up. It was like this pot boiling." In focusing on Bobo's story, Davidtz's own role shrank. She plays Nicola, Bobo's mother who sleeps with a machine gun in case of attacks by people she would consider terrorists. "Nobody wants to see this terribly racist woman behaving badly for an hour and a half," Davidtz said. "Then once I was directing, I was like let's really make that part as small as possible because I can't do all of it at once." Davidtz found Lexi through a Facebook post. It is Lexi's first role and Davidtz wanted an untrained actor. She also shielded Lexi from some of the more adult content of the film. Davidtz filmed with two cameras at once and gave Lexi instructions on how to react. "The way that I worked with her as a non-actor was not to give her a script," Davidtz said. "I didn't give her scenes to learn. If we were in an emotional scene, she didn't really know what was going on a lot of the time." Lexi did get to smoke cigarettes as one of Bobo's acts of rebellion. They were artificial and Davidtz warned her not to smoke real ones. "I said, 'You know why? Because it's going to make you look old and shriveled up before your time,'" she said. "I saw the eyes widen and she registered what I was saying." Now that Davidtz has directed, she would consider doing it again. She said, however, that it would have to be another passion project like Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. "I'd have to love my story as much as I love this story," she said. "I fell in love with that memoir. I just thought she'd done such a brilliant job creating those characters and the characters are the reason I thought, 'Oh, this would tell a great story.'"
Los Angeles Times
7 days ago
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Embeth Davidtz has always been soft-spoken. Stepping up as a director, she decided to roar
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. 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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.
