Ruth Negga on Going from SHIELD to Preacher 

Preacher: Ruth Negga on Tulip\'s Mixture of Violence and \'\'Cheeky Bravado\'\'

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The Agents of SHIELD alum on stepping into a very different comic book world.

Having made an impression as the cool and calculated Raina – well, before her Inhuman transformation changed things for her -- on Agents of SHIELD, Ruth Negga has now made the leap into a very different comic book world with Preacher.

On the adaptation of the DC/Vertigo comic, Negga stars as Tulip, the former girlfriend of Jesse (Dominic Cooper), who is determined to lead him back into the criminal past he’s tried to leave behind. I spoke with Negga about her character’s amazing entrance in the first episode – which included a brutal fight inside a moving car and a homemade bazooka – along with what motivates Tulip and more.

IGN: You had such a cool entrance in the first episode. What did you think when you saw how they were bringing you in?

Negga: That was the first scene I read. I couldn’t believe it. I laughed for a good ten minutes after I read it. I hadn’t read anything like that, specifically for a woman who has that kind of energy and that kind of cheeky bravado. I think that the whole cornfield in itself is amazing but I love how it ends with the kids making a homemade bazooka and her being an odd babysitter of sorts for these latchkey kids. It was that kind of tenderness and humor she has with the kids it kind of subverts that violent edge. It’s important because it is quite violent. But it’s clear that it’s tongue in cheek and exists in a world that is not quite real.

IGN: Right. There’s a version of that scene where you’re scared of the kids, but you’re not because, as you said, there’s something so endearing about her and the entire tone of it is not rooted in reality. Did it take some work to figure out how play the tone of what they were going for here?

Negga: The thing that really resonated when I read the script is that she has a sort of childlikeness to her, her temper and her violence isn’t born out of anything sinister. It’s her reactiveness. I always say that you kind of have a feeling of maternal instinct toward her. She is obviously a bit broken. But despite that she has this lovely sort of naivety about the world. I think that was important to bring out in her sense of -- there’s a love sort of -- when you see female superheroes or Nikita-like people, it’s quite somber. I think that it was important for us to bring the cheeky energy of Garth Ennis’ comics into our characters.

IGN: The comic book is so outrageous and goes so far. At what point did you read the comic and were you amazed that they were going to attempt to bring that to TV?

Negga: Yeah, I mean I read the comics fully after I read the pilot and I think it was quite clear that Seth [Rogen] and Evan [Goldberg] and Sam [Catlin] knew what they were doing and they weren’t going to make the comic frame by frame. It’s a completely different medium and there are certain things you have to engineer to make it work. It’s in confident hands with these guys and they were going to tame it a bit but not in a sort of [literal] way. I think Garth has said as well that it’s impossible to make the comic into frame by frame into a TV series but I think that we retained the spirit of it and the humor of it and the strangeness of it. That’s what I love about it. It’s odd. It’s strange. I love strange movies. There’s no easy calculations there. That’s what people like me, as a viewer, want. Or what I hope they want.

IGN: Initially, she is somewhat the devil on Jesse’s shoulder because she is trying to lure him back to a life he gave up. As you said, she doesn’t come off as an evil person but she’s kind of skewed in a certain direction.

Negga: I don’t think she’s written as some sort of siren luring him onto the rocks. But I think the female protagonist is [usually] going to encourage the male away from danger and away from violence and I like the way we’ve made that upside down. I think for Tulip she just misses her pal. She missed her pal on the road and there’s a comfort in that life that they lead that’s familiar to her and I don’t think she wants to lure him to his death. I think for her it’s quite simple. It’s like “We had a good time, didn’t we? It was fun.” I think what’s frightening for her is anything else, is change. For a lot of us change is frightening and there’s something about him trying to get on the straight and narrow that terrifies her that she would be left behind or he won’t love her anymore. There’s also this aspect that she inherently thinks that’s all she’s good for, that life.

Continue on as Negga discusses Tulip’s history and the evolution of comic book adaptations.