How Sheila the kick-boxing boffin reached for the stars
NOBODY could accuse Sheila Atim of allowing herself to be typecast. The 30-year-old Northern Uganda-born actress lists just a few of the roles she has played in the past two years. She was a witch in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse; an evil tooth fairy in The Irregulars on Netflix; an enslaved midwife in Oscarwinner Barry Jenkins’s outstanding television adaptation of The Underground Railroad, and a mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter in Halle Berry’s directorial debut Bruised.
Atim, who actually studied biomedical science at King’s College, told me that when her agent, Lucy Middleweek, signed her up she said: ‘Let’s just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. Any ethnicity, any height [Atim stands nearly 6ft tall in her stockinged feet] . . . let’s just go for it!’ Such an open-minded outlook has allowed her to embark on a brilliant career. ‘I think I’ve been really lucky,’ she said, speaking on Zoom from her East London apartment. ‘And I want to keep expanding, to see what else is possible.’
Next up: an engagement at London’s Vaudeville Theatre, in Constellations. Michael Longhurst, the Donmar Warehouse’s artistic chief, has assembled a stellar quartet of couples, cutting across gender, race and age barriers, to perform in repertory in Nick Payne’s award-winning play, as star-crossed lovers Roland (a beekeeper) and Marianne (a professor specialising in early universe cosmology).
Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah will kick the season off on June 18, followed by Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker; Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey; and Chris O’Dowd and Anna Maxwell Martin.
She is thrilled to be playing Marianne (same Christian name as her Olivier awardwinning character in Conor McPherson’s Girl From The North Country) alongside fellow Ugandan Jeremiah.
And the science is close to her heart, too. ‘I’ve always loved physics and astronomy,’ she said (though she admits her maths was not strong enough for her to go down that route). Plus, it will also give her a chance to do on stage ‘what I do in my real life all the time — constantly tell people scientific facts, explain theories and biological processes’.
I nod, despite the fact that I’m lost even before we get to ‘endoplasmic reticulum’ (the network of membranes inside a cell, if you’re wondering).
Lest you think she’s just a boffin, Atim also knows a bit about kickboxing, having trained in the sport on and off for six years. Which was useful when Halle Berry, Best Actress Oscar-winner, cast her in Bruised.
Atim’s character is part of the MMA world, and she told me she was happy to help out the stunt team by doing some of her own moves. ‘It was similar for Halle, which is remarkable because she broke ribs — and carried on directing and acting!’
I haven’t seen Bruised yet. But I have watched all ten chapters (as they’re called in the Amazon series) of Barry Jenkins’s The Underground Railroad. Twice!
The show, which streams from May 14, is based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel about Cora, a 14-year-old girl who runs away from a Southern plantation. Atim plays Mabel, Cora’s mother. I’ll have more on The Underground Railroad in another column.