‘You do have
dark nights of
the soul, when
you think ,
“Why am I
doing this?”’
RICHARD PHIBBS
‘It’s so funny, isn’t it, that your parents are just mum and dad. You
don’t think of them as real people till much later,’ says Gugu. ‘Our
dinner-table conversations were often about South Africa, but I was
too young to understand it. It would be more: “Groan! Why is Daddy
talking about politics again?” I just didn’t get it. But it probably has
given me a more questioning mind and a more global perspective.
I’m always looking for the complexities, I’m not satisfied with the
conventional version of a story.’
A keen performer from childhood, she won a place at Rada aged
17, and started her career in television with roles in Spooks and Doctor
Who. It was starring in Belle and Beyond the Lights that inspired her to
visit South Africa for the first time, at the
age of 30. ‘I thought, I’ve done two films
that in different ways deal with identity,
and often I feel the stories that gravitate
towards you are the ones you need to heal
within yourself,’ she says. ‘So I visited
family in Pretoria and Johannesburg and
Soweto, and because it was my first time,
everyone rallied and met up with me.
They jokingly called me “the Unifier”
because some of my cousins hadn’t seen
each other for years.’
Being mixed-race, she says, ‘there is
always a complexity about identity that
you bring. It’s not a riddle that needs to be
solved, it’s a duality that’s part of your
nature. It’s interesting as an actor because
you’re always taking on different identities.’
All the same, though she is now based in Los Angeles, she
remains intensely British at heart. She talks wistfully of the national
sense of humour and ‘grounded realism, which is good for the soul’,
and has a daily relaxation ritual involving lying in a bathful of Epsom
salts, sipping tea and listening to a soundtrack of thunderstorms.
‘I miss the rain so much in LA,’ she confesses. ‘I’m rock ’n’ roll, me! ’
Later this year, she will star opposite Gemma Arterton in the
period drama Summerland, and she has just been cast alongside
Tom Hiddleston in the Marvel Studios project Loki. There is also
talk of a biopic about Mary Seacole, the pioneering Jamaican nurse
and businesswoman. ‘For me, success is freedom and being stimu-
lated and staying curious. I want to be proud of my work, and to feel
it’s doing something to help the culture evolve, but also, I want to
keep myself interested.’ So she eschews contracts that would tie
her into multiple films before she’s read a script, and doesn’t even
dream of an Academy Award. ‘You can’t have that as your end game,
because what are you going to do the day after the Oscars? ’ she
points out reasonably.
The Americans must find her a real enigma, I say, as she gathers
up her coat and prepares to head back out onto the chilly London
streets. ‘Good!’ she declares. ‘I hope it stays that way!’
‘Misbehaviour’ is released in cinemas on 13 March.She shows me a message sent to her on Instagram by a victim of
a sexual assault, who writes that Gugu’s performance had changed
her own perspective on the experience. ‘Thank you for bringing this
story to life and helping our society understand... how varied
women’s experiences with rape and assault can be. You’ve helped me
immensely in my healing process.’ Gugu looks thoughtful as she
puts her phone away. ‘It’s exciting for me to realise that the work can
create conversations and help people to look at things differently.
Obviously, it’s just TV, it’s not therapy, but I think it could spark a shift
in someone... I hope Harvey Weinstein is watching The Morning
Show,’ she concludes. A vocal supporter of the Time’s Up campaign
since its launch, she has never experienced any inappropriate behav-
iour herself, but knows many who have. ‘Even since that episode,
friends I’ve had for a long, long time have been reframing an experi-
ence they had in the light of it,’ she says.
I suggest to her that a lot of her films have a campaigning edge.
For one thing, she seems to make a habit of working with female
directors, despite their being a minority in
the industry. And rarely does she take a
role without a message. Last year’s Mother-
less Brooklyn saw her play a lawyer and
community activist working to prevent
Harlem slum clearances. In her first major
film, Belle, directed by Amma Asante, she
portrayed the illegitimate daughter of a
British admiral who attempts to combat
the slave trade. Beyond the Lights tackled
misogyny in the music industry, and the
Emmy award-winning Black Mirror epi-
sode ‘San Junipero’ drew critical praise for
its positive portrayal of a lesbian relation-
ship. ‘Oh no!’ says Gugu, a little dis mayed
by this analysis. ‘I hope they don’t feel
ove r l y wo r t hy... W i t h “ S a n Ju n ip e r o”, t h a t
script pinged off the page. The twist of it was nothing to do with
being gay or bisexual, I just loved the characters. I didn’t really antici-
pate the impact it would have.’
Nevertheless, she agrees that she needs more than just a pay
cheque to inspire her to accept a role. ‘There are many things I could
have done with my life,’ she says. ‘You do have these dark nights of
the soul, when you think, “Why am I doing this?” And it really helps
if there’s a bigger reason. Otherwise, I think you would get very
jaded, very quickly, with the long hours and the intensity of it all.’
Campaigning may be in her genes. Her father Patrick Mbatha
is South African and grew up under apartheid. As a student, he
joined the ANC, and later, fearing imprisonment on Robben Island,
fled the country, assisted by the UNHCR, with which Gugu now
works as an ambassador. (‘My cousins would say it’s an ancestral
call,’ she says.) He ended up working as a doctor in Oxford, where
he met Anne Raw, a nurse. They named their daughter ‘Gugulethu’,
meaning ‘our pride’ in Zulu.