‘It’s kind of unbelievable’
‘Rocks’ tells a story rarely seen onscreen: What growing up is like for British women of color
LONDON — Bukky Bakray never thought acting was a real possibility for her. So she’s struggling to get her head around winning a BAFTA — the British equivalent of an Oscar — for her first role.
“It’s kind of unbelievable,” Bakray, 19, said, searching for the words to describe her win for playing the titular character in the coming-of-age movie “Rocks.” “I just didn’t expect it at all.”
At the recent BAFTA ceremony, Bakray took home the Rising Star
Award and was also nominated in the leading actress category alongside the likes of Frances McDormand for “Nomadland” and Wunmi Mosaku for “His House.”
Bakray said, “Sometimes when I look back at the pictures, I’m like, ‘Did this actually happen?’ ”
“I just feel really blessed,” she added. “Rocks” — which was the most-nominated film at this year’s BAFTAs — was released in Britain last fall to critical acclaim and is streaming on Netflix in the United States. The movie was shot in summer 2018, when Bakray was 15 and a student at a school in East London. Like most of the cast, she was discovered through open auditions and workshops at schools and youth clubs in the city.
In the film, Bakray plays Olushola Joy Omotoso, known as Rocks, a 15-yearold British Nigerian girl whose life is upended when her mother, who struggles with her mental health, disappears, leaving only an apology note and some cash. Rocks is left to care for her 7-yearold brother, Emmanuel (D’angelou
Osei Kissiedu), doing whatever she can to evade an intervention by the social services.
“Rocks” is equal parts joyful and heart-rending: an ode to friendship and the beauty of girlhood but also a deeply affecting exploration of how external forces can threaten the blossoming of those things.
For many women who have been educated in London’s public school system, the scenes in Rocks’ East London school will feel deeply familiar. The girls dance and make up raps, and treat one another with a mix of impertinence and genuine love and care. In the school’s bathroom, we see Rocks’ best friend, Sumaya, played by British
Somali actress Kosar Ali, talk her through using a tampon for the first time.
The director, Sarah Gavron, said that the idea for the film had started to emerge when she was traveling for her 2015 historical drama “Suffragette.” At screenings, she said, she heard young women connecting women’s suffrage to their own lives and concerns, piquing her interest in what contemporary girlhood was like. So she approached producer Faye Ward with an idea: What if they made a film about girlhood and built it with the girls themselves?
Having such an open-ended idea bred collaboration at all levels, Gavron said. “Everybody sort of fed into it because it was a bit like, ‘We don’t have a road map. How are we going to do this?’ ”
The research process was kicked off by casting director Lucy Pardee, who has built a reputation for discovering talent and who also won a BAFTA for her work on “Rocks.” She spent time sitting at the back of classrooms trying to glean the rhythms of teenagers’ lives, she said. It was during this phase that Gavron and Pardee met Bakray.
“We didn’t want to do that thing that lots of adults do, which is project our own memories and sense of what being a teenager was onto modern teenagers,” Pardee said. “We wanted to get a sense of what their dramas were, what their lives were.”
Open auditions were held to find the cast (Pardee and her associate Jessica Straker saw about 1,300 girls), while workshops were run with teenagers to help build the world and characters around the story that Theresa Ikoko, a British Nigerian playwright, and Claire Wilson, a television writer, had in mind. Out of those processes, the main cast emerged.
While the young actors don’t play themselves in “Rocks,” they were able to feed into the development of the characters. Ikoko brought the scene breakdowns to the actors and asked them to complete exercises, such as writing a diary for their character and deciding what their character’s favorite songs were. That information then informed the script.
The actors’ essence was also a big part of the writing process, Ikoko said. She recalled speaking to Anastasia Dymitrow, who plays a character called
Sabina, about her pride in identifying as Polish Gypsy. The comment was ultimately included in the film, when Dymitrow’s character talks about her grandparents and their imprisonment in Auschwitz.
Referring to the process, Bakray said, “I’d never felt listened to like that before in my life,” recalling that a stray comment she had made about how she used to ritually buy a cake after school with a friend had ended up in a draft of the script. “It made you feel like you had something of substance to say.”
“Rocks” is unusual even among Black British films, which are more likely to follow the narratives of young Black men.
For many British women of color, the opportunity to see their lives and experiences reflected so accurately in film is extremely rare. Tobi Oredein, founder of Black Ballad, an online platform for Black British women, wrote last year, “For the first time in my life, I saw a girl who looked similar to me and my friends as we ran around secondary school trying to figure friendships, education and life at large.”
Bakray likened her time on the film to an education. “‘Rocks’ was a university,” she said. “They weren’t just preparing us to act for ‘Rocks,’ but they were preparing us to act for the foreseeable.”
Bakray, who spoke from Birmingham, where she is filming her next project, said she had work through the end of the year and has auditioned for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
“I feel like kids are sponges,” she said. “And these guys caught me at my prime sponge phase.”