Zimbabwean-American actor Danai Gurira has made a name for herself with the TV series The Walking Dead and the movie Black Panther. And now she has landed a role in the highly anticipated Avengers: End Game.
To celebrate, the 41-year-old actress has showed off her toned figure on the May cover of Shape magazine.
And the star attributes her good looks to eating right: “Five years ago, I made the decision to eat cleaner. I try to avoid dairy, I eat mainly fish, and I have a lot of vegetables. It doesn’t make sense as a meal to me if there is no green on my plate. Eating this way truly made me feel better, and so I’ve stuck with it.”
Gurira also told the monthly magazine that working out has not only kept her body looking shapely, but has also helped her do her job as she often is asked to do difficult stunts.
“For me, the coolest thing is when you feel the work pay off,” said the looker who was born in Iowa, but grew up in Zimbabwe.
“You exercise a lot, and you’re doing your job, shooting long hours. And then you go to work one day, and you have to do something physical…and your body just knows how to do it.
“That happened for me in The Walking Dead and Black Panther.
“I thought, Oh, my God, I did that, and it was not difficult. And I knew that my body was getting smarter as I was devoting hours to its upkeep. It delivered at the moments when I needed it to.”
She also knows how to do self-care.
“I aim to do something in the realm of meditation and prayer every day,” said the college graduate.
“That’s crucial. It’s about having a spiritual relationship and total well-being and really being a person who cares about things far beyond herself.
“If I get too caught up in myself and my little life, it can become a much smaller world. I want to have an aware-ness, a concern, and a service toward the larger world.”
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique — such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity — to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
According to yogajournal.com it takes only 10 minutes a day of meditation to feel much fresher.
And she also said women can be more daring.
“I believe women should be able to play roles that are messy and contradictory and complicated and not always likable, just as men have.
“To me, that’s equality. But we can’t overcorrect and make all female characters strong and perfect. Because that is also limiting and restricting. Women should be able to portray the full gamut of human experience. There’s a lot of power in complexity.”
She was recently she was named a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, also founded and leads Love Our Girls, an organisation with a mission to bring awareness and support to issues affecting women and girls worldwide.
On speaking up for those who can’t she said, ‘It was Valentine’s Day, which is also my birthday, and I thought, If we were to love women and girls in this world more, surely the issues of inequality would steeply diminish or disappear.
“And that’s basically the premise of Love Our Girls. On the 14th of every month we send a newsletter that features women, girls, and organisations around the world that are doing amazing things, but don’t get enough attention.
“To join our efforts, go to logpledge.org and take the pledge. We’ll give you the tools to become involved. It’s a way of giving girls and women, whether they’re in Congo or Brooklyn, more opportunity.”
By HEIDI PARKER: Mailonline
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