Some Irish people give out about ‘immigrants’, then send off a box of Tayto to their son in Australia!
The Irish-Nigerian star of TV3’s Red Rock speaks candidly about the unthinking racism she has encountered during her stellar rise to fame...
Someone thought it was funny to set fire to my friend’s hair My Muslim best friend was forced to sit through our Mass
FROM the age of 15, there wasn’t a doubt in Leah Minto’s mind that she wanted to become a professional actor. Yet when the Dubliner went to the theatre as a youngster, what she saw on stage gave her pause for thought. ‘I remember going to see plays like Sive or Juno and the Paycock and thinking, “I don’t look like these people”, or “there wouldn’t have been someone who looks like me in 1920s Ireland”,’ she admits. ‘It wasn’t that I was told this by anyone else, more it was what I was thinking.’
Happily, the Nigerian-Irish beauty has found that in the last ten years, much has changed in the Irish acting industry.
‘When you’ve been sent call sheets for auditions, now it says, “ethnicity: anything”,’ she says. ‘The casting directors know they want a girl in her 20s — the right girl. I’m in the audition room with a blonde, a redhead or a tall girl. It’s a physical and aesthetic job, so what you look like alongside the rest of the cast matters, but it’s not a tokenism thing now.’
Two years ago, however, Red Rock’s showrunner Kim Revell wanted to create a character that not just reflected a more multicultural Ireland, but would reflect her own biracial upbringing in Birmingham. Leah was perfect for the role of Ash Cahill and arrived on screen in 2017.
Though she acknowledges there were challenges, Leah says that the racism she encountered in her childhood was mild rather than overt.
‘It wasn’t necessarily racism, but there’s a difference between racism and wilful ignorance,’ she reveals. ‘There might be someone who likes to say something to show off, and then you have a situation where you have to be like, “uh, this word is offensive”. Like when someone uses the term “half-caste” — you either move on from it or you can take someone aside and go, “look, this is offensive”. You might hear someone say, “my friend is black, so I can say that”, and I guess that’s what you come up against.’
Many other mixed-race Irish stars have told of how they suffered similar experiences during their childhoods. Former Ireland international Paul McGrath spoke of encountering it in his early football career, while the late Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott told how he patiently allowed classmates to stroke his exotic hair.
Actress Ruth Negga, who grew up in Limerick, is another who couldn’t pinpoint racism, but had definitely felt different. ‘When I was a kid in Ireland, there were not very many black people, I was very much like the strange brown thing, intriguing and cute,’ she has said.
Our country has changed drastically in the years since these experiences, so does Leah feel that modern-day Ireland can be racist?
‘With the Irish sometimes, you can feel a bit of that building up of phrases, “get out of our country”, or “we don’t want certain people here”. It’s not necessarily aimed at me, but just in this broader sense. It’s laughable that some of the Irish are giving out to someone for being an immigrant, like are you serious? It’ll be the same person shipping a box of Tayto off to their son in Australia.
‘My friend nearly got her hair set on fire because she has [Afro-Caribbean hair], and someone thought it would be funny to wave a lighter at it in the smoking area of a bar,’ recalls Leah. ‘He then gave out to her for giving out to him.
‘When I was younger, staring was a big thing — after all, my mum was a black lady in Dublin in the 1990s. My mother is Nigerian-Irish, and my grandfather is Nigerian,’ she reveals. ‘There wasn’t that much of an attachment to Nigerian culture growing up because my mother didn’t have a close relationship with her father.’
Leah and her three sisters — she is the youngest — went to an Educate Together school for primary level, and then an all-girls Catholic school at secondary level.
‘I went from this all genders, all religions, all open, discuss your feelings, if you have an opinion so much the better place, to something very different,’ she recalls.
Of Ireland’s overwhelmingly Catholic school system, Leah adds: ‘There’s three hours of religion a week and we’re not really taught anything in school about the political system or how the country is run. I remember my best friend from school, who is Muslim, being forced to go to the annual Mass. They didn’t want to give her the day off as it wasn’t fair to
others, but instead she had to sit in a church that’s not her own.’
Growing up in the Santry area of North Dublin, Leah attended the National Performing School, run by Colin Farrell’s brother Eamon, before going to the Gaiety School of Acting and the Dublin Youth Theatre. A brief role in Lenny Abrahamson’s What Richard Did aside, Leah was also seen on Irish screens in 2015 in the TV mini-series Rapt, a sci-fi set in Dublin where everyone vanishes in a single instant.
When casting director Louise Kiely offered her the role of Ash, Leah had been living in Norway with her Norwegian partner, returning home regularly for auditions. Little did Leah know that one of them would be a fateful one — after all, she had auditioned for minor roles on Red Rock previously; as a drug dealer, and as a woman who had been attacked and was being interviewed by gardaí.
‘I loved being in Norway, but it came to a point where I realised I needed to come home, take a proper look at acting and ground myself,’ she says. ‘I was really scared moving home.’
The season finale airs this Monday, and the programme will ‘definitely’ return in the autumn for a new season. ‘I’d got a good jump on getting to grips with the role,’ says Leah. ‘I can’t wait to get back to Ash.’
She will next be seen in the highly anticipated film adaptation of Dublin Old School, the play by Emmet Kirwan and Dave Tynan. It’s a role likely to edge Leah even further into the spotlight, though she insists that fame and the sirensong of Hollywood is the furthest thing from her mind.
‘What’s interesting to me is doing plays in theatre spaces that might only hold eight or nine seats,’ she says. ‘I’d like the sort of career that the likes of Cillian Murphy has, being able to go back and forth between different things. I couldn’t tell you two things about the man himself, I love that.’
Leah certainly seems destined to be a fixture on our screens for the near future, but she strikes you as the kind of person who will always remain true to herself — and those around her.
‘My pride in my culture comes from the strength of my mother and everything I’ve seen her be,’ she says. ‘It’s my connection to my sisters, and it roots us to my mother and to our family.’