‘No one says a word when a white actor goes to LA’
Oscar-nominated for ‘Get Out’ and starring in ‘Black Panther’, 28-year-old Londoner Daniel Kaluuya talks to Robbie Collin
Daniel Kaluuya can’t yet bring himself to say the O-word. Or, at least, not until someone else says it first. “Which one?” he says with a chuckle, when I ask him if he has chosen a date for The Ceremony yet. Of course, I mean the Oscars, where the 28-year-old Londoner is in the running for Best Actor next month, for his role in Get Out – although there is also the not-so-small matter of the Baftas on Sunday, where he is in contention for the same honour, as well as the EE Rising Star award.
His plus-one in both cases is his mother, Damalie, who raised him and his sister on a Camden council estate. “She was the one funding everything when I was low, supporting me, the one who said ‘You can find a way’. I couldn’t be here without that kind of love. I’ve got to give her the opportunity to flex, man,” he hoots.
I meet Kaluuya at the ITV Studios in London, where he is about to appear on This Morning – not to talk about Get Out, but the comic-book blockbuster Black Panther, in which he plays W’kabi, one of the eponymous African superhero’s most trusted advisers. Black Panther might be the 18th instalment in Marvel Studios’ ongoing series, but in representational terms it is completely new: a big-budget franchise movie with a majority-black cast and a look inspired by Africa’s culture and art.
He was cast while appearing in the 2016 revival of Blue/orange at the Young Vic. Ryan Coogler, Black Panther’s director, wanted to meet him on Skype so, one day, between matinee and evening shows, he took his laptop to a nearby Pret a Manger, bought a bag of nuts, sat down, and sounded things out. His name had come up because a producer at Marvel had seen a short film he’d made in 2010 – while Jordan Peele, Get Out’s director, knew him from the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits”, which he’d made the following year. “It landed on Netflix in the US long after I made it, and suddenly all these Americans started getting in touch,” he says.
One of his Black Panther co-stars is here too: 24-year-old Letitia Wright, who plays tech-whizz Shuri. Another Black Mirror alumnus, Wright met Kaluuya when he was appearing in Roy Williams’s Sucker Punch at the Royal Court in 2010: she was a star-struck student, and hung around at the end for a selfie, which she still has. The last time they were on television together was seven years ago, in a Channel 4 adaptation of the Debbie Tucker Green play Random. But now, both are steeling themselves for 10 minutes on the sofa with Eamonn and Ruth. It is the morning after Black Panther’s UK premiere: Kaluuya munches an apple from the complimentary fruit bowl, while Wright gingerly sips a Berocca.
This is the first time Kaluuya has been home this year. Get Out has kept him busy in the States, where the film has become an awards season contender, steadily growing in stature since its February 2017 release. A Stepford Wives-like tale of a black photographer who visits his white girlfriend’s well-to-do parents and uncovers a sickening secret, the film struck a chord in a country whose racial divisions are ever-present.
He is only the second black British Best Actor nominee in the ceremony’s 90-year history – and like his forerunner, Chiwetel Ejiofor, who was shortlisted in 2014 for 12 Years a Slave, it is for playing an American. His casting led to a complaint from Samuel L Jackson that black British actors were taking work from their American counterparts – and whatever the truth of that, the sentiment chimed with a wider perception that Britain’s own film and television industries seemed incapable of nurturing this particular segment of home-grown talent. It took a move to the States for Idris Elba to find his breakthrough role in the HBO series The Wire, while David Oyelowo only found a screen role to rival his Shakespearean stage work in Ava Duvernay’s Selma, playing Martin Luther King.
Did Kaluuya feel pressure to follow suit? He pauses. “Do you know what I think is odd?” he says. “When a white actor goes from England to Hollywood, nobody says a word. David was going to America to play Martin Luther King. If a white guy could do that, he would. Instead, it becomes part of this narrative of black struggle and failure. When Chiwetel was nominated for an Oscar but didn’t win, the coverage was all ‘He got rejected’. And I was thinking, how can you put a negative spin on this?”
For Kaluuya, who got his break on the Channel 4 drama Skins before moving into theatre, America was the next logical step. “There are so many factors involved in making that jump,” he says. “There’s ambition, and that’s just spirit – nothing to do with your skin colour. There are your long-term plans, your memories of how you saw the industry as a kid. And then you follow the stories that move you. If Get Out had been a play, I’d have done it as a play. And now we get the opportunity to be in Black Panther, playing African characters for an American director. Why would you block that?”
Wright nods along. For her, the film’s success will be measured by what comes after it. Playing a black woman who is also a scientist made her feel like she was continuing the work begun by Hidden Figures, the recent biopic of three African-american women who worked on the Nasa space programme in the Sixties.
“So many young black women love science, technology, engineering and maths,” she says. “But that’s not the widely held image of the kind of person who likes those things. We’re happy that people are feeling the film, but we also just want it to become normal. We’re trying to make different normal.”
The interesting thing about Get Out is that the film’s target isn’t Confederate flag-waving yahoos, but outwardly respectable white liberals whose racism is more insidious and concealed. “Everyone sees blockbuster racism. But it’s the small stuff you go through every day – that’s the stuff that builds,” says Kaluuya. “And you have to pick your battles.”
There’s a pounding on the dressing-room door. But I still want to hear about last week’s Oscar Luncheon, an event ripe with A-list networking potential for ambitious nominees. Did he get talking to anyone interesting? As a matter of fact he did: the producer Frank Marshall, currently working on the fifth Indiana Jones film with Steven Spielberg, and the husband of Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy. What did they talk about? “I just asked him what he’s learned, having been in the industry for decades. And what he said was fascinating because it was so simple.”
So what’s the secret? “Come on, man!” he laughs. “I ain’t giving you the keys, bro!”
Black Panther is in cinemas now.
‘Everyone sees blockbuster racism. But it’s the small stuff you go through every day – that’s what builds’