‘Luck? My success is hard won’
Noma Dumezweni spent years as a struggling actress. Then along came a certain hit play. She talks to Ben Lawrence
Last year, Noma Dumezweni went viral. She had just won the Best Actress award at the Oliviers for her role as Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and touched hearts and minds with a brief, but keenly felt, speech. This wasn’t the usual political lip service, but a spontaneous affirmation of her success as a refugee child.
“I didn’t realise what I had said until I said it. Something in my head clocked that me, my mum and my sister had arrived in Britain from Uganda 40 years ago.
“I feel so lucky, and I feel so proud to be an African Brit. My mum was blessed with her timing. We lived in a homeless families’ unit but we were together as a family and she was able to earn money while we were waiting to hear whether we had leave to remain. That was 40 years ago and I would like to think that I have contributed to the value of this nation. I don’t mean that to sound arrogant.”
Dumezweni sounds anything but. I can think of few actors who possess such a combination of energy and emotional intelligence. Currently in New York, reprising her Harry Potter role on Broadway, she is something of a force of nature – a chatterer with a low-ish resonant voice that reverberates when she becomes animated, which is quite often.
Her position as an African Brit is pertinent to her latest project, Black Earth Rising, a multi-layered drama from Hugo Blick (The Shadow Line, The Honourable Woman). It deals with Kate Ashby (played by Michaela Coel), who had been a member of the Tutsi tribe and was adopted by British human rights lawyer Eve (Harriet Walter) during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Now in the present day, Eve is leading a trial against a Tutsi militia leader for crimes committed postgenocide and Kate, a legal investigator, embarks on a mission to uncover the truth, confronting questions of her own identity in the process. It’s a drama that questions Western interference in African affairs and whether justice should be best served in the place where crimes occur.
Dumezweni plays a former military general, Alice Munezero, whose past comes back to haunt her. “You can’t quite tell where she is coming from,” she says. “Is she good or is she bad?”
Dumezweni describes herself as “not politically astute”, but says she is “a political being” in her work, something she ascribes to her South African history. She was born in Swaziland to South African parents who had fled because of her father’s work as an anti-apartheid activist. The family then lived in Botswana and Kenya before Uganda, where her mother separated from her father and took Dumezweni and her sister to safety in England – to Suffolk, in fact, where the Wolsey Youth Theatre group in Ipswich provided a platform for her burgeoning talent.
“Thank God for the Wolsey – it saved my bacon because I wasn’t academic. I found my tribe.”
Dumezweni now says she was “lucky” to experience such turbulence in her formative years. “When you are growing up you don’t see it as luck because you are just trying to survive. But from my vantage point of my late 40s [Dumezweni is 49], I can see it as lucky. One met different types of people and had to adjust very quickly and I think that is why I became an actor.
“My history gave me curiosity about humanity, it made my imagination
‘My career speeds up and slows down. Three years ago I was nearly bankrupt. Now I am on Broadway’
flow and that is what you need in the profession.”
Dumezweni didn’t get into drama school and worked in public relations until she got an agent and slowly built up a theatrical CV, working at both the National and the RSC. In 2006, she won her first Olivier for the role of Ruth in a revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun at the Lyric Hammersmith. TV and film roles proved more scarce, although she did appear in Stephen Frears’s acclaimed 2002 film Dirty Pretty Things.
Fame finally came, however, in late 2015, when she was drafted in as a late replacement for Kim Cattrall in the title role of Penelope Skinner’s Linda at the Royal Court (a part that made huge emotional demands) and won over critics even though she initially had to read from the book. Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish said: “If they can bottle and mass-produce whatever it is that Noma Dumezweni has got then, please, I want to order a lifetime’s supply.” This slow-burn success has amazed her.
“It is really strange sitting here talking to you having a coffee and a cigarette. I know that my life has changed and I am grateful that I am older to experience that change. I have seen my career speed up and slow down. Three years ago I was nearly bankrupt and now I am in New York. Not that it was ever about the money. It was about getting the experience.”
I wonder whether the phenomenon of the Cursed Child means that Dumezweni now has Hollywood in her sights. “I always said I would never go to America without a calling card,” she says. “I was never brave enough to be one of those people who would just turn up and see what happens. But then I got the best calling card. But, you know, there is a part of me that just wants to enjoy my life. I have done the struggling actor thing, done not being able to pay the rent, done freaking out because I hadn’t been better in an audition. But now I trust me and the people around me.”
With a sad predictability, Dumezweni’s skin colour became an issue for certain Harry Potter fans when she was cast in the role with an online cabal insisting that Hermione must be a white woman. JK Rowling hit back claiming: “I had a bunch of racists telling me that because Hermione ‘turned white’ – that is, lost colour from her face after a shock – that she must be a white woman, which I have a great deal of difficulty with. But I decided not to get too agitated about it and simply state quite firmly that Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm.”
Clearly tough enough not to let it bother her, Dumezweni did, however, worry about the sheer weight of expectation of the project. “I could have been awful and that would have opened up a whole new level of pain,” she says. Dumezweni is starring in Harry Potter until at least next March, but the actress stresses the importance of being “in the mum zone”. Her 11-year-old daughter, Caoimhe (with Irish drummer Damian Grant), is about to visit her for “a proper New York adventure” when we speak.
After Black Earth Rising, she will be seen in Chiwetel Ejiofor’s featurelength debut as a director, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, and then in Mary Poppins Returns. She uses the word “luck” again. “A friend told me there is no such thing as luck and it is true that all of this is hard won. I have worked my t--s off. But sometimes I feel that I am not quite deserving.”
Anyone who has seen Dumezweni light up the stage or the screen, or indeed a tedious awards ceremony, will beg to differ.