WUNMI MOSAKU

No compromises, she’s building a legacy to be proud of

From the start, Wunmi Mosaku was on a mission, waiting patiently for the right projects, declining ones that felt wrong. “I just felt I couldn’t do them,” she says. “Morally, physically, emotionally. I’d say no. Before anyone even knew my name.”

Now they know. Mosaku, born in Nigeria but a Mancunian since moving to England when she was one, spent a few years climbing the rungs of UK television drama, but recently everything changed. With incredible turns in Misha Green’s HBO series

Lovecraft Country and Remi Weekes’ refugee horror film His House, in which she was the co-lead, she has come into her own. And both speak volumes about who Mosaku is. “I’m interested in racial inequality, social inequality, being a foreigner, being an immigrant, being an asylum seeker, being othered, finding home,” she says. “And those things go through His House and Lovecraft Country.”

It’s a coincidence, she says, that both are horror-tinged social commentaries. “I’m not really into genre: horror, sci-fi, it’s not what I watch,” she explains. “But with His House, for instance, it was really clever to use genre to make the feeling physical, palpable. That fear when you’re watching a horror film, in conjunction with this story of asylum seekers and the horrors they’ve experienced, you feel an iota of what it must feel like.”

She’s immensely proud of His House’s success — a low-budget indie film that sold to Netflix and deeply affected those who saw it. “It was nice to know that you can be seen even without a huge machine behind something,” she says. Talking of which: Marvel’s

Loki, in which Mosaku plays a member of the Time Variance Authority. She was intimidated at the prospect of the Marvel machine, but her nerves were calmed when she discovered how down-to-earth the cosmic production was. “There are a lot more cameras. There’s a lot more going on. But it was cool. Kevin Feige was chill. Everyone was chill!”

She’s currently filming Call Jane, alongside Sigourney Weaver and Elizabeth Banks, based on the stories of Chicago activists who led an underground movement enabling women to have illegal abortions until 1973’s revolutionary ruling Roe v. Wade. The ruling is currently being challenged, so “it feels very necessary right now to tell this story, because sadly we’re regressing,” Mosaku says. “The film matters.” And the mission continues.

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