Cynthia Erivo has always been a runner. “The 100m was my favourite at school and I’ve done a couple of marathons,” the south London actress says from her home in Los Angeles, her nose ring glinting. She is cinema’s greatest sprinter since Tom Cruise, having streaked across the screen as a beautician-turned-robber in Steve McQueen’s Widows, her movie debut.
But now running has a very different role. Off-screen, jogging helps her to escape the characters she plays, who are often weighed down by trauma. Celie in The Color Purple was raped by her father; Aretha Franklin, whom she played in the mini-series Genius: Aretha, lost her mother as a child and became a mother herself at 12; Harriet Tubman, the slave turned abolitionist
