Peter Makurube and Charl Blignaut
Johannesburg songstress Thembi Mtshali has just wrapped up shooting her role in Steven Spielberg’s ambitious new movie Deep Impact.
“It’s not a big role, but it’s a big step forward in a very tough market,” she said this week in a telephone interview from Washington DC.
A spin-off of George Pal’s classic sci-fi thriller When Worlds Collide, Deep Impact tells of a crisis that hits the American government when news breaks that a comet is on a direct collision course with Earth, threatening the planet with extinction.
Mtshali plays an African news correspondent on assignment to the White House, trying to make sense of the confusion that results.
“I went for the role after I saw an ad in a Washington newspaper,” she says, adding that Spielberg had been struggling for some months to find a Swahili-speaking actor for the role. But Mtshali’s Zulu audition won him over.
“I never expected to get the role, simply because competition is so stiff in Hollywood. I really just went along for the fun of it.
“Three weeks later I got a call from Spielberg’s Dreamworks studio and they said: ‘You’ve got the part.’ I thought they were joking. I really didn’t come to America to land a role in a movie, I came over in April to take a break and explore the music scene.”
What makes the movie particularly ambitious is Spielberg’s decision to cast Morgan Freeman as the first-ever black president of the United States, transforming the White House into a veritable who’s who of black American actors.
Although she is best-known as a jazz singer – having shared stages with the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela – Mtshali is no stranger to acting.
In 1988 she played the lead in Oliver Schmitz’s acclaimed Mapantsula, before emerging as a television actor in a string of roles that included a stint on the popular sitcom s’Gudi s’Naysi.
“I’ll always be grateful for the time I spent as an actor in South African TV. It gave me the grounding in film that I needed to compete internationally,” said Mtshali.
Deep Impact will be released in South African cinemas in the middle of May.