When she was eight years old, the actor Embeth Davidtz was pulled out of her home in New Jersey and flown with her South African parents to Pretoria, amid the particularly volatile years of the country’s apartheid system. It was 1974, and while Davidtz’s father took a job as a chemical engineering professor, the country itself was a powder keg, with the ruling white populace losing their power, and political unrest in the streets. “The world around me suddenly became very threatening,” Davidtz remembers. “You’d hear grown-ups talking about threats, about break-ins and standoffs. My parents weren’t outspokenly racist, but they didn’t address the elephant in the room. They didn’t say, ‘Look around you – this is wrong.’ So, because I was a child, I absorbed the fear, the bigotry and the casual violence around me.”
In her early twenties, Davidtz moved back to the US to pursue acting, and found fame as the terrified Jewish maid Helen in Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and later as the angelic schoolteacher Miss Honey in Danny DeVito’s Matilda. She would discuss South Africa in interviews, but rarely the specifics of what she had witnessed, or the trauma it had left behind in her. Or how her political awakening in university had shaped her worldview. “One could imagine it like being a kid growing up in a Maga household today, and then going to a liberal arts college and having their mind blown,” she says. “You’re like… ‘Oh my God, this is the other side! This makes sense to me now!’”
