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GUgu Mbatha-Raw looks happy not to feel the heat. London is pushing 40C on one of those hot mornings when everyone is dressed for the weather: damp collars, shiny faces, hair brushed against the forehead. When we arrive at the central London hotel cafe where we meet, however, the star seems to have entered a different era. Dressed in a shiny linen two-piece, no make-up, no hair, she carries herself with a poise that makes anyone else’s sweat seem muted.
He is, in every sense of the word, cool. This only escalates as we settle into small talk and he tells us that he went to a hotel once.
“I was here during the first Belle – gosh, about 15 years ago,” he says. Then, almost plaintively: “And Prince attended the party.” He laughs at my face. He said: “It was amazing. “Just completely surreal.” It’s the kind of universality that all British actors dream of, and a tale that perhaps feels a little out of place in Mbatha-Raw’s career path. From Belle – Amma Asante’s 2013 visual drama about Dido Elizabeth Belle, the multi-racial daughter of an African slave woman who grows up in an English colony – Mbatha-Raw has become one of Britain’s most influential artists.
From the lead role in Charlie Brooker’s classic episode of Black Mirror San Junipero and co-starring Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon’s #MeToo drama The Morning Show to drive Apple TV attention Above in which she plays a woman recovering from a suicide attempt, the 43-year-old has consistently chosen projects that have an intellectual and political agenda – roles that can be summed up as having “something to say”.
“I don’t want to do the same thing all the time,” says Mbatha-Raw. “It’s fun for me to go from a period drama to a romantic drama to a comedy – it makes me happy.”
That knowledge is what drew him to Possession, Sky’s new spiritual thriller. Mbatha-Raw plays Claudia, a Bristol lawyer who is sent to Jamaica when the wealthy granddaughter of a white plantation owner dies suddenly, leaving her fortune not to her family but to a Jamaican man no one can find. Claudia has been given the case because, as one friend says, having a black, Jamaican lawyer would be “good optics”. But legal work is slowly moving towards something more disturbing: the ghosts of Britain’s colonial legacy – both literal and figurative – are intruding here.
Mbatha-Raw said: “I was very impressed with Claudia because she didn’t know her work and her history. (She’s going) from an aloof, carefree, and ambitious woman who was vain of her heritage and left Jamaican to be settled and rooted.”
The story moves between present-day Jamaica and the real world of plantation slavery. But slaves don’t stay in history: Cudjoe East, who was at the center of the inheritance dispute, is said to be a slave who was cursed centuries ago to roam the earth. In the past, the master of the garden would keep the remains – locks of hair, cut ears – to cast spells on the bodies of those he enslaved. Modern day people find themselves possessed by the spirits of slaves, while Claudia struggles to keep her true identity.
Filmed on location, much of the show’s richness comes from the vision of its Jamaican director, Storm Saulterwhose work has been exploring the history of the country and its identity. The island is translated in polyphonic Technicolor: music and decorative rituals are related to the story, while Obeah – the African-Caribbean spiritual tradition of meeting the ancestors, often feared by the colonial authorities because of its association with resistance and rebellion – is one of the things that repeats over and over again.
“We wanted everything to sound as authentic as possible – the beauty of the colors, the music and the smells of Jamaica, but also the darkness,” says Mbatha-Raw. “We filmed on a real plantation house – all the scenes in the yard, with the slaves working on the land – real people live and die there. Going up the hill to the house, you can feel the history.”
The show is in the same vein as Jordan Peele’s Get out – Racial horrors, in which spirituality takes on the most dangerous legacy of racism. It’s all about revenge, colonialism and Britain’s long-standing relationship with slavery. In one exchange, Claudia and the plantation owner’s son discuss how the British government paid the former slave owners after they abolished it – the debt they wrote. taxpayers until 2015 But those who were slaves received nothing. This is a conversation that resonates especially with the rise of racism and discrimination in the UK and beyond. Is this what they knew when making this show?
He said: “It’s hard to talk about debt repayment, it’s hard to talk about slavery and how we live in peace with this history. “I think that’s what makes (the show) inspiring,” he continued. “You can’t just write history. If we don’t deal with it, it will find ways to hurt us.”
More than a decade separates Possession and Belle, but the two projects feel like talking to each other in their ideas of empire.
“It’s funny because it wasn’t like a big fantasy movie,” he said when I asked him how the movie changed his life. “But it was my first directing role, and it opened up a lot of opportunities for me.” And it was a story that needed to be told. Most people didn’t know that people of different races existed in history – certainly not of any race, because you never saw them in the movies unless they were slaves or otherwise abused.
Before we met, she tells me she walked across Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House, which was the beautiful house where Dido lived. “I wanted to immerse myself in that history before I spoke to you,” he says. Looking back now, she believes that Belle helped shape the future of British drama.
“I think Belle helped pave the way for a show like Bridgerton,” he adds. “Just having black and brown people is a big change in the last 10 years.” Belle also showed the beginning of her friendship with Oprah, who was an early soldier and volunteered to help her US business; the two have been in touch ever since.
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Politics has never been an option in Mbatha-Raw’s life. He was born in 1983 in Witney, a town outside Oxford. His father was an anti-apartheid student and ANC campaigner who fled South Africa to avoid being arrested on Robben Island, eventually rebuilding his life with the help of the UN Refugee Agency.
“I remember we used to talk about politics at the dinner table, but when you live in South Africa, you don’t know the difference,” he says.
He grew up an only child, living with his mother, a British nurse. His parents separated when he was young, but his father remained in his life. Ballet was her first love, as well as music – she trained at the National Youth Music Theater before going to Rada.
As a young, biracial actor – especially one who grew up outside of London – did he feel out of touch with his race? He mocks.
“There were certain roles that would have shut me out, like Regency-era roles, but the industry is changing in a positive way,” he says.
He also says that at the beginning of his career, a great actor – white – told him to change his name to something easier to pronounce. It was advice that he politely ignored.
He said: “I like my name, it makes me who I am. “I don’t think it’s difficult to say that.” It also means ‘our pride’ in Zulu, so this change would feel very wrong—the opposite of what it means!”
After graduating from Rada in 2004, Mbatha-Raw built her career the old fashioned way: on stage. In 2005, he appeared in Antony and Cleopatra before landing one of his first roles opposite Andrew Garfield. Romeo and Juliet at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. Supporting roles in Bad Girls, Marple and Doctor Who followed, before an exciting turn as Ophelia opposite Jude Law’s. Hamlet in the West End and Broadway. JJ Abrams saw the production and cast of him in his American spy drama Undercovers, opening the door to Hollywood. For many years he lived peripatetically, dividing his life between the US and London. Meanwhile, he also lived in London.
His move coincided with a large-scale migration of British football players across the Atlantic. Daniel Kaluuya has spoken about not getting roles in the UK “because of the color of my skin”; David Oyelowo spoke of being “pushed out” because of the “glass ceiling” of nations, as was David Harewood. Blockbuster names such as Cynthia Erivo and Damson Idris have landed their major roles in the US, sparking a long-running debate over whether British film companies should develop their black talent.
When I asked him: “I’ve heard of course, but it didn’t happen to me alone. “I didn’t go to the US to look for opportunities; I was offered a role in Hollywood because of the work I did here – and that’s not something you refuse. I was very lucky.”
Mbatha-Raw is thoughtful and politically minded, but I feel he would do well to speak to his constituents. “I don’t want to tell people what they should think or experience,” he said. But mostly, I just hope people enjoy it.”
Possession starts on August 6 on Sky Atlantic at 9pm.
