When Wunmi Mosaku first met Annie, it was love at first sight.
Writer and director Ryan Coogler introduced the Nigeria-born, Manchester-raised actress to the character, a Hoodoo healer in 1932 Mississippi, with just seven pages of his Sinners screenplay. Namely the scene where Annie is reunited with her old flame Smoke (Michael B Jordan), the father of her dead child, for the first time in years.
“I loved Sinners from the moment I read those seven pages,” says Mosaku, just a few days after the $368m-grossing Warner Bros film has broken the record with 16 Oscar nominations, including best supporting actress for Mosaku.
This was soon followed by a nomination in the same category from Bafta, which previously recognised her with a TV best supporting actress award for 2016’s Damilola, Our Loved Boy. “I loved Annie, I loved Ryan,” she continues. “I had never felt so excited on a project before.”
But with only those seven pages to go by, she had no clue Sinners was a vampire movie. “I thought it was going to be this epic love story,” Mosaku laughs now. Not that she was disheartened when she learned the bloody truth. “When Ryan told me what the film was about, I said, ‘Whoa, how did you come up with that? That is genius.’
“It was clear it was not just a vampire movie. It was about the blues, cultural appropriation, capitalism… If a horror movie is presented in the right way and makes me think about things differently, then it’s not just a horror, you know?”
Despite Mosaku’s enthusiasm for the character and the film’s themes, she confesses to facing one obstacle when playing Annie. “The biggest hurdle was the Hoodoo of it,” she says. “You hear ‘Hoodoo’, and you think, ‘Is that Voodoo? I’m scared. I don’t want to fuck with that.’”
Then she began to delve into the reality of Annie’s beliefs and practices via Katrina Hazzard-Donald’s book Mojo Workin’, given to her by Coogler, and in-depth conversations with Yvonne Chireau, Hoodoo consultant on the film.
“It was a whole process of kind of decolonising my mind,” says Mosaku. “Miss Yvonne talked me through her spiritual practice, the truth of it, the love of it, the healing of it, the ancestry. It was the first time I had seen the connection between the traditional Yoruba spiritual practice of Ifa, and Hoodoo in New Orleans.
“It’s something I had thought was just straight-up evil, like witchcraft,” she continues. “But the word ‘witchcraft’ itself is from the coloniser. They were just medicine women, healers, midwives. So that was the biggest thing I had to learn and unlearn in myself. And it felt intimidating at first. But I’m someone who wants to know more every day about this practice, and the people, and how I can tap into that wisdom and knowledge. That was my biggest education.”
It is clear the experience of making Sinners had a profound affect on Mosaku, but did that make it difficult for her to detach and shift gears to other roles? “It did,” she confirms. “I’m not going to lie, I said to Delroy [Lindo, her Sinners co-star], ‘Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where I get off the train, because I can’t imagine being on another project that means so much.’ And he said, ‘You’re so sweet and young and naïve…’”
Still, she found it “difficult” to occupy the headspace of her next major role, that of stay-at-home mother Belinda in Idris Elba’s adaptation of the Neil LaBute play This Is How It Goes, for Apple Original Films.
“Because I felt so empowered by Annie, this new character felt like putting on a whole new skin, and a lot of judgment came with that. I wanted her to be as enlightened and as confident as Annie. So that was challenging. It took me a long time to take my judgments of her [Belinda] down. Those two characters couldn’t be any more different.”
New opportunities
Variety is certainly something that Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate Mosaku has come to value in her roles. Especially after years of being cast mainly as police officers in UK TV dramas such as Vera, The End of the F***ing World, Kiri and Luther. Since decamping to the US, she has appeared in HBO horror drama Lovecraft Country, universe-hopping Marvel Studios show Loki, David Simon’s crime drama We Own This City (as a lawyer, not a cop), and Netflix sci-fi animation Scavengers Reign.
She has also completed work on Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, the Sony-backed follow-up to The Social Network. “It was a real linguistic challenge to do that high-paced, super-intellectual dialogue that Aaron does,” she says of a sequel that feels, to her, “darker” than the original, “because it feels like this is happening now, what are you going to do about it?”
While she points out the move to the US was for family rather than career reasons (her husband is a Hollywood talent agent), Mosaku does to some degree consider her new home to be more fertile creative territory. “I feel like we [the UK] do great cop shows and mystery shows. But the projects I’ve gotten here are bold and exciting, especially when addressing race and the horrors of humanity.”
Mosaku cites notable exceptions, such as Steve McQueen’s Small Axe, Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You and the output of Apatan Productions, but feels that, on the whole, “in the UK we don’t like to talk about race, and we don’t like to talk about the things that really matter to me, like inequality, hierarchy and revolution. Everything’s very polite. I want to make art that’s challenging our society.”
One way to help achieve that, she recognises, is to source, develop and produce her own material. Mosaku is now starting to consider that course. “Since working with Ryan, I’ve felt a confidence in the fullness of my experience in this industry that I’m not just an actor. I can give good notes, my opinion is important, I understand the whole craft a bit more.”
But, with a second child on the way, her more immediate concern lies outside entertainment. She is launching a line of maternity clothing named Iyade (“it means ‘mother has arrived’”), driven by her determination to not look like “a slob for two years just because I’m pregnant and breastfeeding”.
In the meantime, there is both the hard work (“I’m shattered!”) and joy of the awards season campaign trail with her Sinners crew and co-stars. “From the moment I read those first seven pages to today, it’s been magical,” she beams. All that Hoodoo, it seems, has paid off.
No comments yet