Interview Naomie Harris: It was hard playing the dark side of Winnie Mandela

How do you solve a problem like Winnie Madikizela-Mandela? Perhaps it wouldn’t have legs as a format for a BBC Saturday-night talent show, but it’s a question that Naomie Harris has been trying to answer ever since she agreed to play her in Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

I meet Harris at the Soho Hotel in London on the day before the UK première of the film, which tells the story of Nelson Mandela’s struggles against apartheid. It’s also, it transpires, the day before the death of the former South African president is announced to the world. Since his passing so much has been said about Mandela, but during the half-hour I spend with Harris it is his ex-wife who is uppermost in our minds.

She tells me, remarkably, that she knew next to nothing about the woman when she signed up to star in Long Walk to Freedom. Some hasty research later and the 37-year-old British actor was ‘terrified’, which is an understandable reaction given Madikizela-Mandela’s track record. She might well continue to enjoy popular support in South Africa, but she also has to her name a number of convictions for fraud and a conviction for kidnapping and assault in connection with the death of a 14-year-old boy.

Furthermore, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission found her to be ‘politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights’ carried out by her team of bodyguards. Known as Mandela United Football Club, their torture method of choice, known as necklacing, involved hanging petrol-filled tyres around people’s necks and setting them alight.

Throughout our time together, Harris speaks intelligently and openly, but as far as the chequered history of Madikizela-Mandela is concerned, she picks her words very carefully. The last time she was on the promotional trail, it was to talk up the James Bond behemoth Skyfall, and she admits that discussing the ins and outs of playing Miss Moneypenny was a little simpler.