The BBC has a lot to learn from Netflix about casting
Super-agent Femi Oguns tells Eleanor Halls that in terms of diversity, our entertainment industry is lagging way behind America’s
One day in April 2014, 22-year-old John Boyega received an email from the Hollywood director JJ Abrams with three words: “Where are you?” Boyega was on a date in Catford, but, a panicked hour-long black cab ride and £75 (all the money he’d had) later, he was sitting in Mayfair, hearing that, after eight rounds of auditions, he had been booked for the role of a lifetime as Finn in the new multi-million-dollar Star Wars film The Force Awakens.
Stunned, Boyega, who had grown up on one of south London’s roughest estates, walked over to Oxford Street to meet the man who had helped transform his life: Femi Oguns, the actor turned super-agent whose ground-breaking drama school Identity School of Acting has trained some of the world’s most successful black stars, from Boyega and Black Panther actress Letitia Wright, to woman-of-themoment Michaela Coel.
“We stood outside my office, and, not caring what people thought of us, we just screamed and screamed,” laughs 42-yearold Oguns over the phone. Once they’d stopped screaming, Boyega asked Oguns if he wouldn’t mind lending him some cash to get home. “That moment was a turning point for John, the school, and the industry. We made history,” says Oguns. Much of Boyega’s success was down to the actor’s talent, of course; Oguns says Boyega’s audition for his drama school in 2009 was “astounding”. But it was also the culmination of a very specific, politically charged strategy. “None of my actors will do films about slavery,” he says. “No to gangster roles. No to glorified black best friend roles. It’s hard. Your pockets will remain empty for a while, but that’s how you get the big hits.” Boyega’s profile on the film website IMDB is testament to this: between the cult British sci-fi horror Attack the Block, his first film role in 2011, and 2015, when The Force Awakens came out, there is little sign of life. “Hearing ‘no’ came as a surprise to many, but there are casting directors who have asked me for ‘a white person in a black man’s body’ or ‘an actor with Negroid features’. To me, that’s it, we’re done,” says Oguns. He says he has charged “reparation” fees to producers who have downtrodden his clients in the past. “We are not denying our past,” he says. “And [slavery] is responsible for the mental situation a lot of our youngsters are in now. But, at the same time, we need to find material that is celebrating us. We don’t want to keep seeing slave films.”
In Oguns’s opinion, Hollywood and the US streaming service Netflix are leagues ahead of the UK film and television industries when it comes to a diversity of roles for black actors.
“America is making massive leaps and strides now with films starring people of colour that aren’t talking about being the first person of colour to achieve something, or about slavery.” This is thanks to more black people behind the camera, he says – both directors and writers.
“Netflix has been a life saver,” he says, “because it has actually given a voice to the unheard. My artist fees have quadrupled in terms of how much my actors are now worth, because of the buying and selling power of Netflix. And that means they can say no to the dramas that don’t celebrate them. Netflix also promotes black and minority actors becoming businesses. Look at John Boyega and his own production company making a deal with Netflix. Letitia Wright too. They are creating content for Netflix, and they wouldn’t have been able to if they were still stuck with the big studios. The pandemic has also forced Netflix to invest in huge amounts of money into new content, which is very good news for our actors.”
In Britain, by contrast, Oguns says writers of colour are only commissioned for “culturally specific” content. “It’s very frustrating to be in an industry in which black or Asian
‘My artist fees have quadrupled in terms of how much my actors are worth’
directors and writers are only good enough to write about the ‘black experience’ or the ‘Asian experience’. Anything outside of that? Oh no.
“But when it comes to white directors and white writers, they can tell other people’s stories too, they can tell ours for us, apparently.” He is irritated by the BBC’S decision to hire the white writer Jimmy Mcgovern to create the script for Anthony, a drama about the 18-year-old Liverpudlian Anthony Walker who was murdered in a racist attack in 2005. “I would be very surprised if it goes ahead in the way that it’s billed at the moment. And if it has gone ahead, then it is going to come under a lot of scrutiny,” he says.
Speaking to him, you feel there is real, seismic change afoot in the arts and that Oguns is at its epicentre. Born in north London to Nigerian immigrants, he walked out of drama school, fed up, he says, of the overt racism of the teachers. Instead, he enrolled on a course to study performing arts and race relations, and it was there that he got the idea to open a Bame-orientated drama school – the first of its kind in Britain.
After handing out fliers in Hackney and attracting just 10 students, Oguns opened the school in 2003. Within a couple of years, his actor showcases were being attended by the UK’S leading casting directors, The Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. In 2006, Oguns founded an auxiliary agency group – which continues to represent Boyega and Wright – and in 2018, Oguns opened an Identity School in Los Angeles, which has partnered with power broker William Morris Endeavor Entertainment to place black British actors in Hollywood.
Still, despite his triumph, he still brings scepticism to the idea that this shift will take root back home.
“Black actors are the flavour of the month. Mainstream drama schools are increasingly realising that an institution like us have and continue to attract BAME actors at a mass scale, developing them throughout their training, enabling them to foster successful careers in acting.
“The driving motivation behind the majority of these institutions now looking to diversify their student base, is due to factors such as the BLM movement, which has forced the hand of many of these institutions, but also the impact of Brexit and the current pandemic, which is resulting in major cuts to their revenue, due to the lack of foreign student interest. These institutions are finding that the very people they have isolated for so long are now positioned for dominance within the industry.”
Reflecting on his 17-year career, Oguns quotes a phrase his father, an economist, used to tell him. “He said, ‘We are the architects of our own fortune’, and look at me now, I’m a man of colour who has built this school from the ground up without a penny of public funding. I haven’t bowed to a single pressure, because I refuse to approach life with anyone putting their knee on my neck.”