'Seven Seconds' Actor Clare-Hope Ashitey Is Lensed By Paul Morel For The Last Magazine April 2018

British actor Clare-Hope Ashitey is styled by Adele Cany in images by Paul Morel for The Last Magazine April 2018./ Hair by Brady Lea

In a movie industry where female actors often lack 'deep' roles, Ashitey has them fall into her lap. Last-Magazine's Gautam Balasundar writes: "Growing up, Ashitey was academically inclined and never really entertained the idea of acting as a career option. At eighteen, that changed when she landed a starring role in Alfonso Cuarón’s powerful dystopian film 'Children of Men', about a polluted world in which women are no longer able to have children.

'Children of Men; is over a decade old, but in the last few years it has found a renewed interest when the anti-immigrant sentiment depicted in the film began to spread through real-world politics. Ashitey recognized the importance of the film, despite her young age, but she wouldn’t have been able to imagine its enduring appeal. “It all seemed very relevant at the time and it’s a source of unending disappointment to me that it’s more relevant in the times we’re living in now,” she says.

After graduating with a degree in anthropology from London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Ashitey landed parts in movies such as the Jimi Hendrix biopic 'All Is by My Side' and the sci-fi drama 'The White King'.

The unusually-articulate Ashitey was interviewed by Rolling Stone in February 2018. Reflecting back on 2016, she describes her state of being:

"By the end of 2016, I felt outnumbered by shitheads. . . . Between Trump’s election and Brexit, there were all sorts of opinions coming out of the woodwork that I thought had died out a long time ago," she says. "I was like, what's the point? All we do is bad things. The history of humanity is the history of people exploiting each other."

Coincidentally -- or perhaps through an intervention by the goddesses -- Clare-Hope Ashitey brought her frustrated fatalism to the act of finding her 'Seven Seconds' character, assistant prosecutor KJ Harper.

Influenced by the epidemic of police brutality that led to the deaths of black teenagers like Tamir Rice and Michael Brown (among too many others), the Jersey City-set 'Seven Seconds' explores a crime in Harper's own city -- the often-called sixth borough of New York City. In a story told against the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, her back "tellingly" turned towards them, Rolling Stone writes: "The cast is formidable, particularly Regina King as the victim’s bereft mother and Looking's Raul Castillo as one of the compromised narcotics officers. "A white cop and a black kid? Don’t you watch the news? There are no fucking accidents anymore," Castillo's character shouts at the rookie cop (Beau Knapp) who mowed the boy down – a justification so oft-repeated that it practically becomes a mantra."