Slow Horses star Rosalind Eleazar says she fights hard for roles that “people don’t immediately assume I could play.” The latest example of this is her titular role in Misty Green, the new film from director-writer-producer Chris Rock, in which he also stars.
Misty Green is a Hollywood actress who no longer has the town at her feet. A fast and loose substance abuse lifestyle has knocked her down from acclaim to disdain and forced her to beg for even minor auditions. Yet, Misty is like “a jaguar” — to use Eleazar’s term. She swirls around Los Angles with a swaggering brio that belies her penurious circumstances.
“If someone was to give you a breakdown of Misty Green I wonder if they would immediately go, ‘Rosalind Eleazar for that part?’” she tells me via Zoom from the Dolomites region of the Italian Alps. “I think people may associate me more with, I don’t know, something like being a lawyer,” she says. So Eleazar felt going after the role was “a long shot”, but she connected to Misty the moment she read Rock’s script. More importantly, she wanted the part. “It’s a dream role,” she says.
Having seen her work on stage and screen since the beginning of her career — which includes appearances on stage with the likes of Matthew Broderick and Ralph Fiennes; holding her own playing a memorable Yelena opposite Toby Jones, Richard Armitage, Aimee Lou Wood and Ciarán Hinds In Uncle Vanya at the Harold Pinter Theatre in the West End, and in The House of Bernarda Alba with Harriet Walter at the National Theatre and many TV films and series — Misty Green is undoubtedly the outstanding performance of her career, and by far one of the year’s best.
The East-London-based actor admits “there were tears. I was crying when I thought I didn’t get it… As an actor, one thing I do share with Misty is that you go on this roller-coaster of emotions after you’ve auditioned and it’s out of your hands now, and the next day, you’re like, Oh, I think today I might get a call, and you just live in this endless hope. Then three days go by… So your emotions are constantly going like that,” she says.
She’s in the Dolomites on a hiking holiday with her producer and actor husband Gabriel Lo Giudice (The Wanderer: Destinations Unknown) ahead of arriving in Toronto for TIFF, where she’s planning to meet up with Gary Oldman and some of the acting team behind the motley crew of Apple TV’s Slow Horses.
Then, on Saturday, September 12th, comes Eleazar’s big night — Misty Green will have its world premiere at Roy Thompson Hall.
Next month, the movie will have galas during the BFI London Film Festival and A24 will give Misty Green a limited release from October 9th. Daniel Kaluuya, Adam Driver, Anna Kendrick also star.
Looking back over the whole auditioning process, Eleazar is incredulous over what she put herself through. Still waiting to hear whether or not she’d landed the role, she was in her London apartment “meditating, and I was trying to connect and talk to Chris in my mind,” she reflects with a rueful grimace then a smile. “At one point I genuinely thought I had connected to him, and then whilst I was on set, I said to Chris, ‘Do you remember? Did you ever at one point feel me talking to you?’ He just looked at me and went ‘No,’” she sheepishly divulges.
”You’re lucky if roles like Misty Green come once in a lifetime,” she says, “and I’m so happy that that somehow has worked out for me.”
After two auditions over Zoom in London, the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art graduate flew to Los Angeles for chemistry tests with Rock, who plays a director who understands that hidden beneath Misty’s armor of pain is an artist with proper talent.
Once the part was hers, Eleazar sprang into action. She took singing lessons — performing “One Night Only” from Dreamgirls is one of the movie’s many highlights — and Rock tasked her with watching some movies, including Klute with Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
An aspect of Eleazar’s performance that fascinates me is the sultry physicality with which she infuses Misty. “I move very differently to Misty,” she says, explaining how the 5Rhythms method played a significant role in developing her walk for the movie. The 5Rhythms practice is a movement and dance practice created by Gabrielle Roth intended to liberate the mind and body.
Eleazar played around with where she felt Misty’s natural tempo stood.
“Obviously, throughout the day and through the course of whatever, her tempo changes,” she says, noting that Misty “has quite a lot of sexual energy to her.” The way Misty moves, Eleazar remarks, marks her as “someone that is also wanting to be noticed and someone that is wanting to be respected.”
Eleazar broke out the Misty walk on the streets of LA. “It has to become like second nature, rather than something that on the day of film you suddenly feel self-conscious with because it’s not in your body,” she says. The street test helped her pare down the walk to what she describes as “a floaty staccato,” which allows Misty to “turn corners incredibly fast.” That means, Misty can catch you off guard, giving her a quite languid quality until she springs like the “jaguar” label Eleazar gave her.
Eleazar, who studied Spanish, Mandarin and psychology at the U.K.’s Nottingham University, says she has “a lot of compassion generally for people that come out into the world punching and surviving, and they have these layers upon layers of protection because of whatever’s happened early on in their life, and they’re not immediately likable or lovable, and it takes time to love Misty. She’s not someone that you necessarily easily warm to.”
Eleazar is generally drawn to larger-than-life characters, she says. In all her parts, from her Jacky Bast in Kenneth Lonergan’s 2017 television adaptation of Howards End onwards, she suggests there’s a commonality. “They’ve all been quite big in some way,” she says. “They’re eccentric and sort of Shakespearean, and I find that I enjoy looking for the humanity in those sort of larger-than-life characters.”
Two days prior to auditioning with Rock in LA, she’d read with Ralph Fiennes in London for Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s play Small Hotel, which premiered at the Theatre Royal in Bath with Fiennes and Francesca Annis in the fall of 2025. There’s a slim chance of it transferring into the West End in 2027, if scheduling doesn’t get in the way.
For some reason Judi Dench becomes a topic in our conversation. When I remark that I still replay in my head the Cleopatra the great dame performed opposite Anthony Hopkins in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre in 1987, Eleazar’s eyes light up. “Cleopatra is my dream role!” she cries. She’d love to play Medea and Elektra too.
Surely working with Oldman, Saskia Reeves, Jack Lowden, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ruth Bradley, Christopher Chung, Aimee-Ffionn Edwards, Kadiff Kirwan and others on Slow Horses is like being in a theatrical repertory company, because they all come from theater backgrounds?
Nodding admiringly, she says that the cast often takes tea with Oldman who “sort of watches over all of us and is interested in you and what you’re doing and is always a champion of your work.”
She connected with Kaluuya in part because they both hail from the theater, although Misty Green is the first time they’ve worked together. “We would take lots of long walks together and discuss our shared history for the characters and also sharing our own stories. And he’s just an insane actor… I love dangerous actors — Anna [Kendrick] and Adam [Driver] too — you feel you can jump off together and see where you land,” she says, adding that her scenes with Kaluuya were incendiary. “Every take was so different and that beautiful trust you have with someone…”
In the film, Rock’s character raises questions about racism and sexism in Hollywood but those subjects are not the film’s main concerns, a point that Eleazar concurs with. “Misty Green isn’t about race,” she says. However, she and Rock did have a conversation about it. “I think that there are places for different types of films, and this character was able to just exist, and there’s a universality to her. It didn’t matter that she was my skin color, that’s not the leading narrative of the film,” she says.
And off screen whenever she has “potentially experienced certain things” related to race “I privately deal with it, and I kind of think to myself, well, let my work do the talking. I would love to be known as someone that is a solid actor rather than other things. But it doesn’t mean that I’m unaffected by it. Let’s say I’m not unaffected by sexism and racism in our industry,” she says.
If Misty Green takes off for her the way I feel it will, then Eleazar’s going to be very busy. Could she move to Hollywood for work? She has an American passport. “I can I can work there if I started doing a lot more American projects and if it made sense. I do love living in London though, and still loads of shows are made out of the U.K. and in Europe.”
Smiling, Eleazar looks directly at me and says: “This sounds incredibly cheesy, but when part of your dream is starting to become true, it’s actually also quite frightening, because you’re like, oh my gosh, I have portrayed this character in this movie, and I’m incredibly proud of all of our work. And it’s now at the stage of sharing with other people, and it feels exposing. But at the same time, I’m incredibly excited by it, and I’m feeling grateful. What an opportunity I had. And Chris giving me that opportunity — it was a long shot.”
Misty Green will premiere 9.30pm, September 12th at Roy Thompson Hall at the Toronto Film Festival.
Get our Breaking News Alerts and Keep your inbox happy.
Comments On Deadline Hollywood are monitored. So don't go off topic, don't impersonate anyone, and don't get your facts wrong.
Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() );