Cynthia Onyedinmanasu Chinasaokwu Erivo (born 8 January 1987) is an English actress, singer, and songwriter.
She is known for her performance as Celie in the Broadway revival of The Color Purple, for which she won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical, the Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album, and the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Musical Performance in a Daytime Program, the latter two she shared with the rest of the cast.
Erivo ventured into films in 2018, with roles in the heist film Widows and the thriller Bad Times at the El Royale. In 2019, she portrayed abolitionist Harriet Tubman in the biopic Harriet, for which she earned nominations for an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Award.
Anthony Chen Talks Sundance Title ‘Drift’, Upcoming Projects And Plans To Shoot In Hong Kong
deadline.comSingaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen is on a roll – his English-language debut Drift is premiering at Sundance Film Festival, he has Chinese-language drama The Breaking Ice being readied for festival play later this year, and several other directing projects in different languages at various stages of development and pre-production.
Drift, which stars Cynthia Erivo as a Liberian refugee scratching out an existence on a Greek island, is thematically not a million miles away from Chen’s previous two features – Ilo Ilo and Wet Season – in that they’re stories about outsiders or people struggling to find their place in the world and fit in. “I seem to gravitate to telling stories about outsiders and the bonds, or the human connections, that we make between strangers,” says Chen, who has some experience with feeling dislocated, as he grew up in Singapore but spent many years living in the UK.
Chen shot the film, based on Alexander Maksik’s 2013 novel A Marker To Measure Drift, on location in Greece and the UK last year, starting pre-production just a few weeks after wrapping the winter shoot of The Breaking Ice in China’s Jilin province. “Chinese productions always have a lot of crew, so I went from working with a crew of 120 people to just 40 in Europe, and from shooting seven days a week to just five,” Chen recalls of this rapid shift from China’s frozen far Northeast to Southern Europe. “But it was very efficient and we had some of the top heads of department on the film. “ The crew of Drift includes DoP Crystel Fournier, who shot Celine Sciamma’s ‘Girlhood’ trilogy, and first assistant director Dominique Delany, who worked on Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and a few projects with Olivier Assayas.
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