MOVIES : A Revolutionary Style : Thandie Newton exhibits a refreshingly natural ease in both acting--in the new ‘Jefferson in Paris’-- and in interviews.

There’s a unique pleasure in coming into contact with young actors before they learn to exude the self-censoring, play-the-game attitude that comes with stardom. What hardened Hollywood vet would freely admit, “I really do just talk my pants off,” as Thandie Newton did happily in a recent interview?

She continued: “Thank God they aren’t going to have me do any live TV shows--they can’t let me do it. David Letterman could get up and get a cup of coffee and I’d just keep on going.”

But it’s not as if Newton enjoys simply blathering on about herself. Ask her a serious question about a serious subject, and she’ll respond with a thorough, thoughtful answer--no glib sound bites for her. Ask, and be prepared to listen.

“I tend to over-analyze everything. There’s no straight answer for anything, that’s something that university has taught me,” says the actress, currently embroiled in her final months of study at Cambridge University. “In (grade) school, you were given a text and it was gospel--there were no questions. In university, they tell you, ‘It could be this or it could be this--you decide.’ So now I question everything until it’s lying there trembling on the ground, saying, ‘Mercy! Mercy!’ ”

“Mercy!” may be Newton’s own reaction to the barrage of scripts she’s likely to get once Hollywood has seen her work in “Jefferson in Paris,” the latest lush period spectacle from the team of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory (and their first film under a deal with Disney).

“She can give off these sparks flying at you,” Merchant says. “She looks at you without saying anything and sparks come from her. She has that kind of dynamic personality.”

Ivory adds, “She has wonderful taste, a wonderful sense of timing, an extreme sense of natural inventiveness. She never puts a foot wrong. She hasn’t studied acting, yet she is a very good natural.”

“Jefferson in Paris” examines the period Thomas Jefferson (played by Nick Nolte) spent as a U.S. diplomat in France, touching on an aborted courtship with a married woman, Maria Cosway (Greta Scacchi), and his subsequent relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings (Newton). Jefferson’s relationship with Hemings was long speculated about and reported even during his lifetime but was never given official credence until the 1974 biography “Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History,” written by the late Fawn Brodie who taught at UCLA from 1968 to ’77. Before the film was even completed, it had come under attack from historical revisionists who insist that Thomas Jefferson-- our third President , for crying out loud--could never have had a sexual dalliance out of wedlock, and certainly not with someone he would have considered “property.”

“I believe wholeheartedly that she did have Jefferson’s children, and there was never any thought in my mind that that was fabricated,” Newton says. “I wouldn’t have been involved in the filmmaking if I believed that.

“It’s very coldhearted that people feel so ashamed that Jefferson would have had this relationship,” she adds. “It’s difficult, you get into these racist attitudes--the Jeffersonians say, ‘This is disgusting, how can you mar him like this?’ Are they saying that it’s so wrong for him to have a relationship with a black woman? Or that this is a man who wrote the Declaration of Independence, who wrote, ‘All men are created equal,’ and yet he kept slaves?

“But you can’t take him out of the context of the time,” she continues. “Here’s a man whose sole desire in life was to be loved by the public in such a way as to become President, and the majority of public thinking at the time was that black people were inferior. And slave owners often slept with slaves.” (Hemings herself was the daughter of a slave and a white landowner.)

Part of the controversy, Newton says, stems from the fact, simply put, that “Jefferson’s not here to defend himself. His defenders nowadays feel that it’s their obligation to dismiss anything that makes him seem less perfect in their eyes. The movie is not a condemnation of his character.”

Here, Newton demonstrates her ability to look at every side of an issue. “Yes, he wasn’t progressive with the black American population, and a lot of negative aspects come out of the film, but I don’t think the Jeffersonians should see it as marring what he did for America,” she says, adding: “He was a very able President, but people deserve a more rounded view of the man.”

The film depicts the burgeoning relationship with some ambiguity. As played by Newton, Hemings does not resist becoming involved with Jefferson and even displays some pleasure from their alliance. Yet the mood of the romantic interludes still plays as ominous and foreboding.

“She’s like a moth dancing about a fire, not realizing that it’s going to be hurt by it,” Newton explains. “It’s drawn to it. In some way, that’s what the film is doing. It’s pushing her as a character to be free, to be liberated, and she becomes burnt. . . . She becomes aware that her destiny is limited.”

Newton’s own destiny is anything but. Her family moved from Zambia to England, her father’s homeland, when she was 5; she studied dance and music in school. While recuperating from a back injury that interrupted her dancing, she was asked to audition for Australian filmmaker John Duigan’s “Flirting” (made in 1990, released in America in 1992). Other small films followed, as well as a bit part in “Interview With the Vampire.” After “Jefferson,” she reunited with Duigan on “The Journey of August King,” co-starring an actor she calls, with some bemusement, “the enigmatic Jason Patric.”

“Only in the last couple of years have I considered myself an actor,” Newton says. “Up until then, I was in school and movies would come along--’Thandie, do you want to do this?’ ‘Yeah, OK’--and this went on for five films. And then I thought, ‘My God, I really am an actress.’ But I never imagined myself to be a spectacle like that. I was just going to be a chorus dancer and I was very happy with that.”

Now, stardom beckons, but Newton can wait, thank you.

“Publicists are ringing up, saying, ‘Come on, let’s get you on magazine covers,’ and I was with that for a while, thinking that was what I needed to do. Then I thought, ‘Whoa, no, I have all the time in the world.’ If you want to be a celebrity, then you have to push it and cash in on everything when the climate is right, which would be now for me. But I’m quite content to lie low and work my way up gradually.”

So Newton will lie low at least until she finishes her schooling at Cambridge this summer, where she studies anthropology.

Why anthropology? “I’ve never studied anything outside of literature and the arts. I’ve never had experience in science, or chemistry, philosophy, biology or psychology, and anthropology seemed to dip into all those things. But I realize now it’s something I wouldn’t want to give my life over to. It’s made me feel quite disillusioned about human nature.”

And, lest she become even more disillusioned with human nature, she’s wary about invitations from friends and advisers to pursue her career in Los Angeles.

“I don’t know if I could handle it, to be honest,” she says frankly. “I can’t deal with the way people talk--there’s this overzealous enthusiasm for your work that’s not subtle at all: ‘You were great , it was great !’ So when you actually see this ‘great’ piece of work, it’s anticlimactic because they’ve built it up so much. In England, they say, ‘Oh, it’s all right,’ and you see it and think, ‘Yeah, it’s good.’ It’s delayed gratification, where here, you’re over-gratified all the time.”

On the other hand, Newton allows that she might be convinced to adapt to the hyper-real, swimming-pools-and-movie-stars gestalt of Hollywood: “It’s like going to the circus out here--just enjoy it. It sounds so nasty, but I’m not being cruel. If you know it’s gonna happen, it’s kind of funny, and you just maintain your own thoughts about things, then it’s OK.”