Cynthia Erivo on Prima Facie: 'If a person isn't conscious, they're not saying yes'

Cynthia Erivo stars in Prima Facie as a rising-star barrister who defends men accused of sexual violence — until a colleague rapes her and her world implodes. The film, the subject of a new Guardian interview, puts the actor at the centre of one of cinema's most charged debates: how the law treats consent.

Erivo's position on the question is blunt. "If a person isn't conscious, they're not saying yes," she told the Guardian, in a line that anchors the film's moral argument. Her character, fluent in the procedures that acquit accused men, must suddenly survive them from the inside. Erivo spoke about the potential impact of the film — and about how she is navigating what the interview calls her stratospheric success.

The interview opens in a quiet corner of a west London restaurant, where Erivo considers her favourite crisps. "Ruffles are just perfect," she says of the ridged American brand. "When you get a good batch, and the salt-to-potato ratio is perfect … it's amazing."

The small vice sits oddly against the regime around it. Erivo had just landed after singing in Phoenix, Arizona, the night before. Before that concert came a seat at the Dior front row during Paris fashion week. She has also just been announced as a guest host on SNL UK.

What does her schedule demand?

A strict one. Erivo does not drink alcohol; at the interview she orders peppermint tea. She is vegan. She refuses airline food and travels only with her own prepacked meals. At home she uses an infra-red sauna "to help me heal from the inside".

Earlier this year she ran the London Marathon — then jumped straight on stage to perform Dracula, playing all 23 parts. She rehearsed her lines during the marathon training runs themselves, reciting text on gruelling distances before the race and the performance arrived in the same week.

All of it, the Guardian notes, requires discipline and snacks to keep the show on the road.

Dressed all in black, with her signature elongated nails, Erivo cuts the figure of an actor in complete control of her instrument. Prima Facie now extends that control into material with sharp legal and social stakes. Whether the film shifts the conversation around consent and the courts, as Erivo hopes, will become clear when audiences see her barrister's world implode on screen.