16 The Times Magazinector David Harewood, who
attained international stardom
with roles in dramas including
Homeland and The Night
Manager, has developed a sideline
in documentaries revealing
uncomfortable truths about Britain.
In 2007, as part of a BBC special
marking the 200th anniversary
of Abolition, he visited Viscount
Lascelles at Harewood House, built in the
18th century with the proceeds of a slave trade
that saw his own enslaved ancestors working
on the family’s Caribbean sugar plantations. In
2016, he presented a BBC documentary called
Will Britain Ever Have a Black Prime Minister?
And in 2018 he confronted his own struggles
with a psychotic breakdown in David Harewood:
My Psychosis and Me.
It’s a surprise to discover therefore, as
I talk to him about his new BBC documentary,
Why Is Covid Killing People of Colour?, that
he has actually spent most of the past decade
in North America. His filming commitments
across the Atlantic mean he generally only
gets two months a year with his wife and two
teenaged daughters in south London, with
occasional trips on long weekends in between.
An arrangement that has been necessary,
he says, because of the lack of opportunities
for black actors over here.
“In my generation, there are very few
black actors who have had the opportunities
I’ve had given to me from America,” he says,
speaking over Zoom from a flat in Vancouver,
where he is quarantining before directing
and acting in the new series of Supergirl.
“And that’s partly because I’ve proved to
them that I’m a good worker. Whereas, when
I came out of Rada, I was in The Bill and
Casualty and doing very two-dimensional
roles. It was crushing that I wasn’t going to
be doing the type of work I imagined.”
When he got offered the part in Homeland
in 2010, the Birmingham-born actor only had
£80 left in the bank and hadn’t worked for
months. “My career was done. Then suddenly
I’m swanning around in Hollywood with
movie stars. From feeling like utter shit to
feeling like I’m on top of the world. And
I think it’s America that’s given me that sense
of value. I mean, they’re letting me direct
on a budget of £6 million; I’m speaking on
panels with executives from Warner Bros.
I don’t think I’d ever have been given that
opportunity in Britain.”
If this is a damning verdict on British race
relations, there are even bleaker assessments
in his new documentary, as he attempts to
work out why minority ethnic communities
have suffered disproportionately during this
pandemic, with people of colour accounting
for 34 per cent of all patients admitted to
intensive care in the first wave (more thantwice what you’d expect), 95 per cent of all
doctors who have died from Covid (while
making up 44 per cent of doctors), and 63 per
cent of health worker fatalities (while making
up 21 per cent of the NHS workforce).
He explores possible explanations, from
vitamin D deficiency to the high blood
pressure, diabetes, heart disease and obesity
which are known to afflict communities of
colour to a disproportionate degree. Digging
deeper, he realises that some of these factors
could be explained by the disproportionate
deprivation of BAME communities: healthy
food costs three times as much to get the
same amount of energy from as unhealthy
food; you exercise less if you live in a deprived
area, because there is less access to green
space and more pollution; etc.
But then, dwelling on the awkward
fact of high BAME doctor deaths, and the
concomitant fact that doctors are not poor,
he faces the possibility that systemic racism
may be a factor. Systemic racism which sees
people of colour working disproportionately in
relatively lowly frontline jobs and being up to
five times more likely to have kidney failure.
Which also sees black children being nearly
three times more likely to be admitted
to hospital for asthma attacks than white
children and black women being five times
more likely to die in pregnancy and childbirth.
In the documentary he observes, “As a
black man, I’m more likely to suffer from
dementia, have a stroke, suffer from various
forms of cancers. If we’re talking about
psychological stuff, black people are up to
ten times more likely to suffer from serious
psychiatric problems, and up to four timesmore likely to be sectioned under the Mental
Health Act than a white person my own age.
And I know full well about that – because
I was sectioned when I was 23.”
If he makes it personal, it’s because the
disease is a personal issue for him: leaving
aside the fact that, as a 55-year-old black
man, he is three times more likely to die from
Covid-19 than a white man of his age, he is at
particular risk because he suffers from asthma,
has hypertension and chronic kidney disease.
“This virus seems to have my name written
all over it,” he says, adding that he narrowly
avoided getting Covid over Christmas when
his wife and daughter caught it. “Luckily, they
were asymptomatic, but this thing is real, and
it amazed me that somehow I didn’t get it.”
Quarantine rules and work commitments
mean that Harewood won’t get to see his
family until August, and being so used to video
conferencing as a result may also explain
why he is so good on Zoom. Our conversation
shouldn’t feel intimate: international video
calls rarely are and there is a PR listening
in. But it does. The intimacy perhaps being
intensified by the fact that Vancouver looks as
grey as London through the window behind
him (he could be next door), by the fact that
quarantine means Harewood hasn’t “washed
or left the house for eight days” and is keen
for company and chat, and also by the fact he
is using this dead time to work on a memoir,
an experience that is making him reflective.
He tells me he is “banging out” up to
12,000 words a week, and that it has the
working title Maybe I Don’t Belong Here – a
reference to the dislocation he has felt since
his childhood in Birmingham. “I rememberA
With Dr Tariq Husain
in Why Is Covid Killing
People of Colour?PREVIOUS SPREAD: JOHN HONG/THE LICENSING PROJECT. THIS SPREAD: BBC. PA, KENT SMITH/SHOWTIME