Early on in Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s career, an older, white actor advised she change her name to something easier to pronounce. She declined – a strong choice for a young actor. “I don’t think it’s that strong,” rebuts Mbatha-Raw. She likes her name. Besides, “it means ‘Our Pride’ in Zulu. To change that would be the antithesis of its meaning.”
Mbatha-Raw is known for choosing roles that combine art and social advocacy. She’s won awards, been honoured with an MBE, appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency. People still mispronounce her name, though. The most extreme example she recalls was in Norway, when a host announced her from a piece of paper. “Gucci… Matthew… Ray? I was like, ‘I guess that’s me!’”
I wonder if this says something about the west’s complacency regarding the achievements of those with ethnic roots elsewhere. Doesn’t middle England relate more easily to names that reflect their own? “I disagree,” she says. “I think it’s OK for people to be challenged. To reach outside their culture and know that’s not all there is.” Yes, but do they? “Well, you’ve got to give them the opportunity.” The answer brings me up short.
We’re at a farmhouse table at a west London photography studio. When I walked in, Mbatha-Raw was wearing beads of jewellery and doing a fan dance with a pink tutu. She’s here to promote the second series of Surface, the Apple TV thriller about a woman who suffers memory loss after an apparent suicide attempt. “I’d seen other amnesia stories, but always featuring a male protagonist, from a male point of view,” she says.
Surface, made by Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s media company, offered Mbatha-Raw the opportunity to come on board as an executive producer.
She relished being a bigger part of the process, from pitching to Apple to choosing the creative team and having a voice at script level. Surface investigates identity, trust and trauma. The first series, set in San Francisco, was measured and mysterious. The second series takes place in the UK – “darker, faster-paced, a bit grittier.”
It also boasts a bigger cast including Joely Richardson and Tara Fitzgerald, actors Mbatha-Raw looks up to. Of anyone working today, who does she most admire? “Cate Blanchett”, she says. “I love how she carries herself in the world.” Blanchett, a fellow UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, is widely respected for her elegance and range, splitting roles between stage and screen. Also, “I don’t know much about her personal life, which I like.”
Mbatha-Raw has never publicly discussed her private life (it’s unknown if she is currently in a relationship). “It’s a way to have longevity as an artist,” she explains. Her job is to take audiences on an imaginative journey through a character. The more they know about the actor, the less they believe. “If people have too many ideas about your world, it dilutes the work,” she says. It’s a purist view of the craft. “There’s this Michaela Coel quote from a few years ago, about how it’s OK to disappear,” she goes on. “As an artist you need to refill the well, have something to say.” She remembers life before the internet and social media. “I’m thankful to have a perspective that isn’t just pushing yourself out there, simply for the sake of being present.”
Her self-possession is admirable, but it comes with a certain reserve, a graceful front I’m not sure I’m allowed to see behind. I wonder if I should tease her, but it’s hard – she’s a Teflon mix of LA positivity and British politeness. She keeps a gratitude journal, which she combines with morning pages (a daily practice of stream-of-consciousness writing), and is given to exclaiming “Oh gosh!” like Ned Flanders. When someone sets down a plate of fresh-baked brownies on the table in front of us, she actually says “Holy moly!” I tell her she has head girl energy. “Well, I was head girl,” she says. Optimism is part of everything she does. Getting up at 4am to film on location in the freezing cold necessitates faith in a larger goal. “You have to believe in things you can’t yet see.”
Mbatha-Raw was born in the small town of Witney in Oxfordshire in 1983, to a white mother, Anne, a nurse, and a black South African father, Patrick, a physician. Her parents met at the Churchill Hospital, a cancer centre, and divorced when she was around three. They remain active presences in her life. Her mother gave her confidence and work ethic, she says, and supported every interest, from saxophone to ballet. An only child, she was already itching to begin the life of a professional artist. “I would’ve moved to London at age 12,” she says, “if she’d let me.”
Her father, an activist who fled apartheid, gifted her political awareness. She remembers dinner table conversations that gave her a global perspective, opening up questions about justice and equality. “As my dad always said, in South Africa, you’re politicised at birth. It’s not a luxury, or a choice.” She has family in Johannesburg. Visiting the country as an adult deepened her understanding of Britain’s role in world history. “Culturally, that’s something we’re still figuring out.”
As an adolescent, painting was her passion. During the YBA years she was inspired by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and by the fleshy, psychologically acute portraits of Jenny Saville. But theatre ultimately brought her more out of herself. She started attending the National Youth Music Theatre and was accepted into Rada, which she started two weeks after 9/11.
She made her name in a 2009 production of Hamlet opposite Jude Law, followed by the landmark 2013 film Belle. Two years later she was nominated for an Evening Standard award for her performance in Jess Swale’s play Nell Gwyn, about an orange seller who rose socially to become the mistress of Charles II. She gained a new level of visibility starring in San Junipero, the queer, Emmy-winning episode of Black Mirror. In 2017 the Queen awarded her an MBE for services to drama.
Social change happens incrementally, but there are people and moments that drive it. Belle, the 2013 film in which Mbatha-Raw played mixed-race aristocrat Lady Dido Elizabeth Belle, was one. Based on a true story, it helped overturn staid assumptions of what period drama looked like. Without Belle, there might not have been a Bridgerton, a show she credits with lasting influence in her industry, particularly the hiring of non-white crew members on sets. “There’s a generation of runners and assistants on Bridgerton who are coming up from there, moving onwards.”
Diversity is a cause she’s passionate about. While her achievements are frequently held up as a success story, representation is only one aspect of it. “You could go, ‘Oh [the industry has been] fixed because there’s this person in front of the camera’,” she says. “But actually behind the camera is no different than it’s been for years.” In the last two or three years she’s noticed a positive shift, she says, at least in the UK. She now uses her executive role to widen opportunity when staffing crews, as a condition of her involvement. The last two sets she’s worked on have been “by far the most diverse of my whole career, and that’s not by accident”.
I ask if she experienced racism growing up in a small town in the 80s. She wasn’t really aware of racism, she says. This stuns me. “I don’t know if I was living in a post-racial bubble of ignorance, or if that was just my experience,” she shrugs.
When she was a little older, she learned more about her father’s experiences under apartheid.
Working in America in her mid-20s was another turning point. The media there is far more sharply tuned to race, and she observed people keen to assign labels, sometimes farcically. An early experience was ppromoting JJ Abrams’s espionage drama Undercovers in 2010. She recalls being introduced by a host, who announced, “This is the first show to feature two African-American leads since The Cosby Show!” The only problem being: “I’m biracial British, and my co-star was German-Ghanaian.”
She’s since worked with the biggest names in showbusiness, including Oprah Winfrey, who was supportive of Belle, and whom she later acted alongside in Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. The last time they met was for Edward Enninful’s final Vogue cover, which showcased 40 stars including Serena Williams, Naomi Campbell and Laverne Cox, over the strapline “Legendary!” It was surreal, she says. “To be in a room with somebody like Jane Fond…” she catches herself. “With Jane Fonda! There’s nobody like Jane Fonda.”
It is an extraordinary cover: a latter-day, female Sergeant Pepper. “Everyone thought it was Photoshopped! With AI and CGI, no one believes we were all in one place.” The day may have been a blur, but something stayed with her. “I was in awe of the elders. The mature women in the room, and that idea of longevity that I aspire to.”
Longevity is hard for anyone, and there is extra pressure on people of colour. I ask about Will Smith, her co-star on Concussion. She has nothing but praise for his generosity, like the occasion she mentioned she no longer had time for painting. “The next day, my trailer was filled with paints and an easel, in classic Will Smith style.”
During the pandemic Mbatha-Raw was locked down in her Los Angeles apartment. Turning out cupboards in boredom, she found the unused art materials Smith had given her. She began painting portraits from photographs, as a way of connecting with family who weren’t there. “To be able to concentrate on somebody’s face made me feel close to them.” Painting every day, and watching the news, she saw America’s racial divisions play out. At the most painful collective moment of 2020, she painted portraits of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, black citizens killed by the police. “It became a way to metabolise what was going on.” She later auctioned the pieces to raise money for Equal Justice Initiative, The Bail Project, M4BL and Black Lives Matter.
Life is short, she says as we finish. “You hope people appreciate what you’re trying to do, but you can’t get hung up on it.” There’s that self-possession again. It feels innate, but Mbatha-Raw insists it’s something she’s worked on over time. So what’s been the key to her confidence? It boils down to trusting one’s intuition. “If something isn’t feeling good, I’m OK to say it right away, rather than fester,” she reflects. “Your gut is always trying to tell you something.”
After years living out of a suitcase, she’s now settled back in Oxfordshire. Though settled may be the wrong word. We’ll see her leading upcoming Doctor Who spin-off, The War Between the Land and the Sea. She’s about to fly to the Caribbean for two months to complete Inheritance, a Sky Original which addresses legacies of slavery and colonialism. Filmed between Bristol and Jamaica, the show will tackle the theme of slavery reparations, and how we measure the harms of the past. “It’s going to be a conversation provoker; and I’m excited for the conversation.” She’s where she wants to be, sailing right into the storms that rage loudest. Or maybe she’s making her own weather.
How does she switch off? More often than not, watching nature documentaries. “Something where there’s no acting,” she says, pondering the appeal. “That fish is just being itself. Just swimming in the ocean. That’s relaxing to me.”
Surface season 2 is streaming on Apple TV+
Fashion editor Jo Jones; hair by James Catalano at The Wall Group using Amika; makeup by Tania Grier using Prada Beauty; fashion assistant Sam Deaman; photographer’s assistants Ethan Humphries and Sophie Phillips
