‘I’ll be back in the UK – but I’m not playing a cop’: Oscar-winner Wunmi Mosaku for sexy vampire smash Sinners | Sinners

‘I “I love Greg,” says Wunmi Mosaku, sitting on a sofa in a Holborn hotel in London. She’s extolling the virtues of street baking after I jokingly suggested that’s what she could have for lunch, and has now returned to the UK from her base in Los Angeles. Despite remaining in the United States for the better part of a decade, she has lost none of her Manchester accent or sense of humour.

“Do you know what I love about Greggs?” “In every city, they have something specific to that place. So in London, they have Tottenham cake. Manchester, they have Eccles cake. In Liverpool, they have Scouse pie. In Newcastle, they have… a ton of bagels. You can’t get that anywhere else!”

Mosaku learned all about Greggs’ regional dishes while touring her first play, Straight Out of Rada in 2007. She played “The Scientist” in the Great World Theatre, a 17th-century mystery play, and took it all over the country. As well as introducing her to the magic of a plump cake, it was the first step in a career that has reached dizzying heights in the past 18 months.

In the middle of a relentless awards season, the 39-year-old Mancunian is on the bandwagon of Sinners, director Ryan Coogler’s syndicated vampire thriller set in the American Deep South in the 1930s. She’s an outside bet for a Best Supporting Female Oscar, which means she’s currently zigzagging the Atlantic. Mosaku’s performance as Annie, the Hoodoo priestess who gives the film its emotional center, propelled her to new levels of stardom. She may be able to make it onto regional Greggs menus, but she also dazzled at the Golden Globes, pregnant in a bright yellow dress, and became a regular magazine cover star. After we’re done, you’ll go have a chat with Graham Norton.

Fame brought levels of attention that were not always welcome. Mosaku announced she was pregnant with her second child in Vogue magazine, to coincide with the Golden Globe Awards — in part to put an end to mounting speculation. “In my Nigerian culture, we don’t really announce this kind of news. It’s supposed to be protected. And everything inside me resists sharing it publicly — not because I’m not grateful or happy, but because this feels like one of the few things that truly belongs to me,” she wrote.

Mosaku managed to hide her first pregnancy while starring in an ITV supernatural police procedural show (think Happy Valley meets The X-Files). But this time, with the increased attention the Sinners brought, she was under pressure to announce. “I was really against it,” Mosaku says. “But then I thought, if I’m going to do this, I want to do it with the caveat that I say, ‘I don’t want to do this, but I feel like… Must “Because you’re all commenting on our bodies.” She watched her Sinners co-star Hailee Steinfeld endure months of speculation before telling her Instagram followers that she was expecting a baby with her husband, NFL star Josh Allen.

This is new territory for Mosaku, who worked her way up after winning a BAFTA for her performance as Damilola Taylor’s mother Gloria in the 2017 BBC drama, before moving stateside, where she vacillated between Marvel epic Loki and more daring performances, such as David Simon’s 2022 police corruption series We Run This Town.

It could have been completely different. Mosaku’s parents, both academics, moved their family to Manchester from Zaria, Nigeria, when Mosaku was single. Later in life, she considered following their path by becoming a mathematics professor. She gained a university place but decided to try acting, and auditioned for Rada instead. Her father wasn’t too keen but her mother supported the decision. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here,” Mosaku says matter-of-factly. Her mother gave her £30, which was enough for her to get to London, get back on the Megabus and buy some food.

But the pair struck a deal: if Mosaku didn’t get a place at RADA, she would go to university in Durham to study mathematics and economics. “No one thought I would be in,” she says, but she impressed the panel by playing Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Queen Margaret from Richard III, and various parts of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Moving to London was not easy. Chorlton-cum-Hardie, the south Manchester suburb of Mosaku, might be described as a leafy, middle-class area today, full of BBC executives driving up house prices, but that was not her family’s experience. Although Mosaku’s parents were academics in Nigeria, life in the UK was very different. Neither of them could find work in the fields of architecture and chemistry they desired – so they made do with what they could. Money was in short supply. “We were on council property,” Mosaku says. “My mom worked really hard. We were definitely one of those families where, if someone rang the doorbell, the kids would all hide, because you couldn’t tell my mom was at work.”

All this made moving to Rada risky. Mosaku was the only Black girl in her class, something that was not easy at the institution that admitted in 2020 that it was institutionally racist after pressure from former students. Mosaku was one of many talented young actors: her future Loki co-stars Tom Hiddleston and Gugu Mbatha-Raw were there at the same time. But she remembers an environment in which some teachers struggled to view her as more than just a bit player. “I never got a lead role,” she says, recalling the time she was cast as a 50-year-old ship captain. “I could never play naive.”

“Why do I limit the way I envision my career? I think teachers are the most important people in a person’s life. They make you either flourish or wither. I was really lucky to have teachers like Bill Gaskell, who made me believe I could flourish, but I had a lot of people along the way who made me feel like, ‘Oh, this isn’t for you,'” she asks.

In Ryan Coogler, I found a kindred spirit. After seeing Mosaku in We Own This City, he thought it would be perfect when Annie and the couple set up a 30-minute Zoom call that snowballed into an hour-and-a-half heart-to-heart, during which they discussed their motivations and the people who inspired them. “We bonded on our first Zoom around these teachers, the ones who really put you on the path and the ones who almost took you off it.” (Coogler brought his college professor Rosemary Graham, who told him he should write screenplays in Hollywood, to the recent awards ceremony.)

Actors often tout the same few well-polished anecdotes on the awards season tour, heaping praise on their colleagues. But when Mosaku was asked about Annie, she spoke of it as a transformative experience, like a religious convert bearing witness before the unanointed.

To prepare for her role as Annie, who loses a child with one of Michael B. Jordan’s twin characters, Mosaku studied hoodoo, which has its roots in the traditional Yoruba religion brought to America by enslaved Africans. This led to her becoming deeply connected to her Yoruba roots – and the language she started learning five years ago was finally starting to appeal to her. She likens the experience to an archaeologist slowly discovering a long-lost civilization during an excavation. “Oh,” she said to herself. “This is where I come from. This is who I am. This is part of my survival.” The other thing that came to her mind was how disconnected she was from her own culture.

Mosaku attributes this to her upbringing in Manchester. She was supposed to become fluent in Yoruba, but her parents discouraged teaching their children the language because it would give them “funny accents.” For Mosaku, who has played immigrants throughout her career, this is the high price newcomers pay: people are asked to cut off parts of their culture to “fit in.”

“These are the things that really matter,” she says, visibly moved. “You don’t appreciate the cost to people, the tax on a person’s soul to assimilate into your country – and for what? It’s superiority. It’s ego. It’s brutal. It’s cultural genocide.”

Does she see herself returning to the UK? “A lot of people are making me excited to work in the UK,” she says, mentioning listing director Akinola Davies Jr., Joan Iwola’s Apatan Productions, and Bolu Babalola. “I never take my eyes off the UK looking for work,” she adds. “Artistically, I feel like working in America has been more fulfilling. I just want to make sure I’m not always playing a police officer in the UK, you know?”

We have roles ahead of us in Apple’s This Is How It Goes, alongside Idris Elba, and a part in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, his follow-up to The Social Network. The jury is still out on whether the UK can keep up, but if it decides to make a comeback, Greggs will be waiting.