Since Chad died I’m so afraid to lose people: Wright

LETITIA Wright (pictured) was a rising star of British indie films before Chadwick Boseman handpicked her for the Marvel blockbuster. She talks about his death — and how it turned her life around. Elvis! Hey Elvis!” Letitia Wright calls enthusiastically. A waiter walks over. “Elvis is my friend. Elvis, Simon. Simon, Elvis.” Elvis and I introduce ourselves, and he takes my order.

Wow, what a coincidence, I say to Wright — a friend of yours working here. How long have you known Elvis? “I just met him today.” She laughs. “I try to connect with people.” Did he recognise you? “No! Elvis doesn’t care who I am. He just cares if I’m a kind person or not.”

We meet at a restaurant in the Shard, London’s famous spike in the sky. Her publicist refers to her as Tish, so I ask Wright if she prefers people to call her Letitia or Tish. Letitia, she says instantly, correcting my pronunciation (it’s Leteesha).

I’m not surprised Elvis hasn’t recognised her. When I first see Wright in her hoodie and cap she looks tiny — year seven, maybe, just off to secondary school. But she’s actually a 29-year-old woman, and the longer you spend with her the more you realise how striking her face is.

Wright is a wonderful actor and a great chooser of parts. And we’re here today to talk about three new ones — all of them winners.

You could not get three more different movies than Aisha, The Silent Twins and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

In Aisha, she plays an asylum seeker so quietly traumatised she’s barely there. The Silent Twins is the true story of two elective mutes who end up in the high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor after being bludgeoned with racist abuse in their early schooldays.

And in Wakanda Forever, she reprises her role as scientist superhero Shuri.

What makes this prolific output all the more impressive is that she is still grieving for the actor Chadwick Boseman, her fictional brother in Black Panther and as close to a real brother as she’s had in real life. “I was devastated, as you can imagine.

I’ve had to process it through therapy,” she says. “It’s not like I had a two-year break to process it and then came back into the film. We had to start six months after Chad died.” It’s only later that I begin to understand the depth of her grief.

Wright, who was born in Guyana, still has a hint of the accent in her voice. Her family came to the UK when she was seven, and she says her first experience of acting was at primary school in London soon afterwards.

Not that she knew it at the time. “I didn’t want anybody to make fun of me, so I started to change my accent, and that’s where acting started to seep in.” When did she realise that was acting? “When I started to grow up and learn all the accents, you realise, ‘Oh, you changed your accent to present yourself to be something different, or for people to believe you belong to a particular place when you don’t.’ It was to combat the fact that I was different.” How long did it take to fit in? “A couple of years.” Did it have the desired effect?” She nods. “The impact over time was that people stopped making fun of it.” Wright comes to a stop. “I regret doing that now. As a kid you don’t know how special you are. I wish I hadn’t done it.”

The funny thing is that while she wanted to hide her own accent, at school she met and befriended many children who also had foreign accents. Some were refugees and asylum seekers.

This, she says, is where her interest in the issue comes from. “It’s something that, as a child, I observed before clicking on the TV and seeing what people were saying on the news. You go to school with people — one minute they’re here, and the next they’re gone. And you’re, like, ‘Why?’

And you don’t know how to communicate that as a kid. But when you grow up you realise a kid got deported because they didn’t get their papers.” Did it happen to any of her friends? “Yes, I know people close to me who have been in detention centres. And this is hard to witness as a child, a teenager, a young woman.”

Wright was an only child. Her mother is a teacher, her father works in the agricultural business. She went to secondary school in Tottenham, north London and, encouraged by “amazing teachers”, took up drama. At 16 she joined the part-time Identity School of Acting in south London, where she became close friends with actor John Boyega.

He told her he was hoping to be in international films and taught her how to dream big. By the age of 17 she had appeared on TV in Top Boy and Holby City. The film industry magazine Screen International recognised her as one of its 2012 Stars of Tomorrow after her appearance in the British crime drama film My Brother the Devil, in which she played another character called Aisha.

Things appeared to be going well for Wright. But then she suffered a deep depression and considered quitting. She says she had lost her values and sense of perspective. Wright partied and drank and tried to obliterate herself in work, but none of it helped.

Her friend, actor Malachi Kirby (who played Kunta Kinte in the remake of the TV series Roots), called her one day and said he knew she was in a bad way and that God had told him to reach out to her. Wright wasn’t having any of it, but agreed to go along with him to an actors’ Bible study.

Her life was transformed. The depression lifted, and her career soared. I ask how Christianity changed her. “It gave me the centring I needed, the good foundation I needed, and it helped me to put in perspective what was important for me.

Chasing something that is not tangible or not wholesome is not the way I want to go. If I was to pack all this up I’d still be happy with my faith, the contentment I feel and the connection to God.”

Had she been chasing unwholesome things? “Yes of course. We all chase things. You feel you need a better job, or better role, or more accolades, or more recognition. And I was chasing that. I had been chasing, chasing, chasing, but feeling empty.

I realised I don’t have to chase that anymore. If I trust that God has a plan for my life and I follow that and trust I’m doing the right things, then if people feel it, they will. I just want my work to speak for itself, and I feel that’s what Aisha does, and what Shuri in Black Panther does.”

Does she come from a religious family? “My parents have always had faith, but it wasn’t something we continually practised. I had to find what worked for me and I found that Jesus worked for me. The more I prayed, the more I felt connected, and the less anxious.”

On her return to acting, she appeared in a number of memorable parts. In 2014, she played Amal in the musical drama Glasgow Girls, based on the true story of pupils who fought the Home Office to prevent their school friend being deported. In 2015, she starred in the moving Michael Caton-Jones movie Urban Hymn as Jamie, a volatile offender with an angelic voice.

Wright was irresistible as Scotty, the slip of a thing who falls in love with and stalks a much older woman, in Russell T Davies’s Banana.

I tell her that I mentioned to Davies I was meeting her, and he told me he adored working with her. “She’s amazing,” he texted. “She was intense and devoted to the work, and kind of otherworldly. I had no idea what was going on in her head. She felt very special. But unknowable. You’d have marked her out for a lifetime of real, gritty Ken Loach films, so I’m amazed and happy she’s a Marvel star.”