CLARE-HOPE ASHITEY FINDS RESOLVE IN TACKLING SOCIAL ISSUES

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For most actors, getting a lead role in an Oscar-nominated film at eighteen years old would be a dream. Clare-Hope Ashitey, however, has always been in search of a greater understanding of the world, whether that means choosing increasingly deep roles or stepping away from the industry altogether. With the timely new Netflix show Seven Seconds, she’s back in the spotlight, once again finding solace in tackling one of the most complex social issues of the moment.

Growing up, Ashitey was academically inclined and never really entertained the idea of acting as a career option. At eighteen, that changed when she landed a starring role in Alfonso Cuarón’s powerful dystopian film Children of Men, about a polluted world in which women are no longer able to have children—the result of only her second audition. Suddenly, Ashitey was traveling and missing school and meeting industry types, and she found herself moving into adulthood faster than expected. “I felt that I needed to rejoin my peers,” she recalls. “I spent a couple of years working as an adult in the world and people were very nice to me, but I think I just felt that I was pretending to be an adult a lot of the time.” She alternated between work and school for a while before ultimately deciding to redirect her attention to the latter. “I had been to LA a couple of times and didn’t enjoy the atmosphere and didn’t really feel like I could hold my own,” she explains. “I’m usually a confident person so it was very unsettling for me to be somewhere that would make me feel so uncomfortable. I’ve always been academic, I always loved studying, and I wasn’t ready to stop doing that.”

After graduating with a degree in anthropology from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Ashitey landed parts in movies such as the Jimi Hendrix biopic All Is by My Side and the sci-fi drama The White King. Now with Seven Seconds, about the aftermath of the killing of a black child by a police officer, she feels more at ease in her profession than ever before. “While we never stop growing and learning, I’m definitely more comfortable in my own skin than I used to be,” she offers. “It depends on the job and it depends on the people, but I actually feel more comfortable in my job, more comfortable saying this is my job. And I love acting, that’s never changed.” Part of that comfort is due to Ashitey’s careful selection of projects to work on, which tend to be politically or socially aware. “I think there’s also a way in which those kinds of stories tend to be written with a little more care, because they’re written by people who are passionate about the subject and that just means the scripts are better.”

Children of Men is over a decade old, but in the last few years it has found a renewed interest when the anti-immigrant sentiment depicted in the film began to spread through real-world politics. Ashitey recognized the importance of the film, despite her young age, but she wouldn’t have been able to imagine its enduring appeal. “It all seemed very relevant at the time and it’s a source of unending disappointment to me that it’s more relevant in the times we’re living in now,” she says. That disappointment culminated in 2016, which was as challenging for Ashitey as it was everyone else in the Western world…at least until Seven Seconds came along. “We had Brexit in the UK and Trump was voted in in the US and I slightly—almost entirely—lost my fight and my drive because I felt very outnumbered in a way that I hadn’t ever actually felt,” she explains. “There wasn’t really much hope in anything, and then I got the script and it was so passionately written, and I think aside from it being well written, it just felt like it gave me the impulse back to keep fighting.”

In Seven Seconds, Ashitey plays KJ Harper, a prosecutor who evokes many of those feelings people felt in 2016—tired and defeated, with little relief other than sitting at a dark bar with a drink in hand. When a black teen is accidentally hit by a cop car driven by a white officer, a cover-up ensues, and KJ regains some of her motivation when she’s tasked with uncovering the truth. “She finds hope and rediscovers her own internal moral compass,” Ashitey explains. “The progress isn’t linear and that’s one of the things I like about the story, because progress never is.” The show presents a complex view of social politics in America, one without easy solutions. It depicts a realistic version of the present, where we’re often asked to definitively pick a side, even when there’s nuance and doubt. “So much of what we experience and how we consume news and media encourages us to either choose black or white—and very quickly, like a snap decision on how we think about these things based on a small headline or sound bite—and it isn’t at all.”

Ashitey sometimes finds herself susceptible to those snap decisions and it becomes a point of contention within herself. “We make decisions based on very little information, without looking at things and understanding that they’re any one of those fifty million shades of gray in between and it’s very frustrating. I do it myself and I feel myself doing it and I’m frustrated by myself when I do that and it’s something I’m trying to combat,” she admits. “It seems to be the way we process things and it’s incredibly unhelpful.” Whether it’s her engagement with her characters or her own outlook on life, Ashitey taps into the feelings that many people in the world are experiencing right now. She finds resolve in her self-awareness and continuously seeks out challenges in her roles. “Every single job changes me in some way,” she says. “I don’t think you can work on a show or a film that deals with the very worst of humanity and not be changed by it in some way.”

Seven Seconds is now available on Netflix.