Newton has previously considered reverting to her original name, but said in 2017 she did not think it worth the hassle, believing it was more important that people recognised her work.
"What's in a name? What's in a skin colour?" she said in an interview. "C'est la vie. C'est la guerre."
But the world is a different place and Newton a different woman.
Last week, she expressed outrage over the Government's contentious report over race disparity in the UK, taking to Twitter to suggest it could only be an April Fool's joke.
"There's no way it can be real - it would be unethical insanity," she wrote, urging young people of colour to share their responses to the report, which claimed systemic racism did not exist in the UK.
Newton has lived with racism for her entire life. Born in London to a British father, Nick, and a Zimbabwean mother, Nyasha, a princess from the Shona tribe, she spent time in Zambia before the family relocated to Penzance, Cornwall, when she was 3.
On her first day at a Catholic school, a nun told her mother: "We're very excited, we've never had one before" and she was later banned from a school photograph for wearing cornrows.
Newton has acknowledged that her mixed race heritage meant that when she was younger, she had no sense of herself.
"I was not considered anything," she once said. "There was a lot that people could have been interested in in me when I was young. They didn't want to express it, because they didn't want to praise the black girl."
Forced to look abroad for work due to a lack of chances in the UK, she has said: "I can't do Downton Abbey, can't be in Victoria, can't be in Call The Midwife - well, I could, but I don't want to play someone who's being racially abused."
Elsewhere in the Vogue interview, Newton said as she had become older, her mindset had changed, and that she had been inspired to use her personal experiences to be more outspoken.
Discussing her role in Westworld, she said she loved how subversive it was.
"Wherever I position myself now, I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be part of the solution.
"I'm not for hire anymore. I'm not going to speak your story or say your words if I don't feel they could've come from me."
The actress said she found that acting took more and more away from her "because I'm more connected to myself than I've ever been, whereas before... I couldn't wait to get away from myself, truly, I had such low self-esteem."
The actress also discussed how she was abused by a director when she was 16 and how she realised she needed to seek help for an eating disorder.
Newton replied to a tweet about the spelling of her name in 2016. "Thandiwe is a Zulu name meaning Beloved," she said. "Thandie is an abbreviation. You don't have to pretend anything."
