“I felt like my BAFTA statue was judging me!” Gbemisola Ikumelo on backlash, Black Ops, and why 2026 will be her year | television

IIn 2020, as long-overdue conversations about race spread around the world, Gbemisola Ekumelo, now 39, made a decision. “I had this soul-destroying experience while working,” she says, her sunny demeanor belying the bleak story. She decided to post online about the microaggressions she experienced while appearing in a play a few years ago, came to terms with the fact that it could affect her chances at future roles, and shuddered as she wrote the thread. One day passed, and I just heard my phone going off Ding, ding, ding. “I was convinced it would be a backlash, but people were sending their congratulations.” Ikomelo was nominated for a BAFTA for her short film Brain in Gear. “I felt like God was going to say to me: ‘Don’t worry.’” It was a beautiful moment.” She won a BAFTA and has since won another. “When I won the first award, I was living in a small apartment, and I felt like… [statuette] “He was judging me,” she laughs. “I was like, ‘I might have to renovate or move.’ Now I have an office, so they’re in a very reasonable location.”

She feels she should keep some shelves empty. After flirting with television roles in the United States, in 2025 Ikomelo joined the writing and acting staff of the NBC spinoff series The Paper. Closer to home, she also filmed another series of the show that netted her the second of those aforementioned awards, for Best Female Comedic Performance – the feisty cop buddy comedy Black Ops (still hoping the brilliantly disturbing Brain in Gear will make it to a series).

We meet ahead of the Black Ops early preview, where the first two episodes will elicit a torrent of laughs and gasps from the audience. Ikomelo then tells the audience, “It’s kinda funny, isn’t it?!” If her rise seems meteoric, it has been fueled by years of hard graft on stage (“The stage was the man who refused to marry me…we lived together for 20 years”) and now on screen. Her breakout television role came in comedian Dane Baptiste’s Sunny D a decade ago. Ikumelo then exercised her funny bones by writing and acting in another BBC series, the irreverent sketch show Famalam. She remembers the first time she was recognized in the wild. “I was in a play and I was eating my sad lunch outside,” she says. “A random person says, ‘Are you done with that?'” and it took her a second to realize that he wasn’t asking for her leftovers, but rather repeating the slogan uttered by her character Fat Sam, a chicken-obsessed schoolboy.

Black Ops – co-created by Famalam alumnus Akemnji Ndifornyen and writers Joe Tucker and Lloyd Wolf – has seen its knack for creating and fleshing out miserable but likable characters further honed. An exciting and very silly crime story about two inexperienced and misfit police community support officers who are forced to go undercover, and much of its charm comes from the chemistry between its heroes, Dom (Ekumelo) and Kai, played by Hamed Animation (Please Like, The Wheel of Time). “It’s energy on the legs!” says Ikumelo. “I’m a bit more introverted, and I can be a curmudgeon. So he does his best, but he also makes me do it.” for me Best work.”

The first series saw the duo thrown into the treacherous underworld of the Brightmarsh gang, headed by Tevin (Ndivornin). This time, they just went and got a promotion to MI5. Once again, the series cleverly highlights the gap between their lives as brave crime fighters and their very ordinary – and in Dom’s case, middle-class – existence. While shows like Top Boy made Urban Decay an exciting export, Ikomelo saw a gap in the market for something that worked with a lighter touch, and diversified the types of black characters we see on screen. “In terms of what it means to be a Londoner, especially a black Londoner, I think it’s important to challenge that,” she says. “Dom says, ‘I live in de Beauvoir! I don’t know anything about gangs.’ Not that the show forgets the hypocrisy of race He does It affects those who get into trouble with the law. “We realized there was a deeper world out there—the gang was serving a larger, more upper-middle-class auteur,” Icumello recalled in the first season. In contrast, Season 2 sees Kai heading toward the knife’s amnesty box while returning his uniform to the police station.

The core of the series is a plot to bring down the Notting Hill Carnival, as hatched by a charming spy named Steve (Outlander’s Ed Speleers) who, says Icumello, is “so charismatic and kind that you want to hang on to every word he says.” Cathy Tyson – who has enjoyed a welcome renaissance recently in dramas like Blue Lights and Boiling Point – also joins the cast in a bit of a dream casting for Ikumelo. However, the emotional core of the series remains Dom and Kay (“They develop into real friends, and there’s a partnership. And that’s tested in some ways,” says Icumello, trying to avoid Capital S spoilers). Even as her star continues to rise, she clearly has a soft spot for producing excellent local comedy. “I love their genuine work culture [in the US]“But I always miss the rain and the grey, cold, damp air,” she says. With this show, I’m at home… I feel like I’m at home.