The Times Magazine 17watching the great West Indian cricket team
with my dad, in 1976,” he says. “It was the only
time I ever saw black faces on television. My
dad laughing, roaring with every boundary,
the crowd cheering and drums banging and
everyone dancing. It felt like I was part of a
black culture. And it was so rare. There’s a
sense of displacement that’s been constant
throughout my life.”
In the new documentary, talking to
Professor Arline Geronimus, who believes
that the lived experience of racism can take
a physical toll, so-called “weathering” making
the victims of sustained racism biologically
older than their chronological age, he recalls
the racist abuse of his youth in Birmingham.
“I’d be walking home from school and
somebody would just shout n***** out of
a car or, you know, make monkey noises. And
I can remember that fear. I would tense, I’d
sort of get all tight and there’d be that rush of
adrenaline that would go through my body.”
To me, he elaborates: “The walk home
from school, you literally risked your life. If
someone called you a ‘black so-and-so’ you
never went home and told your mum. You just
sucked it up. I used to ask my dad about what
it was like for him coming over – he would
never talk about it. I wanted to talk to him
about it, because I was experiencing it and it
was making me feel uncomfortable and scared.”
He believes the racism continued when his
psychosis resulted in hospitalisation. “One of
the things that I’m writing about in my book
is the discovery I was given four times the
legal dosage of tranquillisers, regularly, when
I was sectioned, three times a day. Four times
the legal dose. I have heard, as a black man,
I’m probably likely to be given higher dosages
of sedatives than a white man. It’s the fear of
this ‘big black person’ rather than treatment.”
I tell him how much I admired the
documentary, probably the best ever made on
the topic of severe mental illness. When you’re
suffering from psychosis, as my father and
sister have done, people are often scared of
you, and this is especially true of black men.
It did nothing less than humanise one of the
most demonised, most stigmatised and most
feared sections of society. He responds that it
is the work he is most proud of, above career
highlights including The Mountaintop, a play
in which he played Martin Luther King on the
last night of his life, and Homeland.
The film has led to meetings with the
president of the Royal College of Psychiatry,
doctors stopping him on the street saying it
has given them insight into their work with
black patients, and endless conversations with
members of the public, recognising him for his
story rather than a role.
“I’m very, very proud it has taken a little bit
of the stigma off psychosis. I sometimes forget
I’m an actor. I’m walking round Sainsbury’sand somebody will go, ‘Oh, you’re that bloke,’
and it takes me a minute to go, ‘Oh, yeah.’
After the documentary, people relate to me as
David Harewood. It’s not, ‘You’re that guy off
the telly,’ they’ll come up to me and go, ‘You
did that documentary,’ and they’ll engage
me as a real person, because they’ve seen me
be very vulnerable. And I love how that has
stripped any artifice of celebrity from me.”
Does he remember much about his
psychosis? “I remember chunks of it. I was
very much in and out of it, but it makes
me wonder how the hell I came through.
After four days, I sat up in bed and was like,
‘What am I doing in here?’ And not only that,
I then went back to acting, got on with it,
and I haven’t stopped working since. It should
be a source of inspiration to people who
struggle. But I do sometimes wonder just
how the f*** I came through it.”
He tells me that, for the memoir, he is
finally reading the medical records he was
too frightened to consult for the documentary.
“They’re really scary. To read your crazy
self and what you were saying: it’s unnerving.
I was just shifting through these different
identities. I was screaming about having to
find a black boy, ‘Save the black boy,’ just as
seven policemen jumped on me and injected
me with tranquillisers. I’ve been deciphering
it and I was so unhappy at the time; I think
I wanted to get back to the boy that I was. I
wanted to skip over my unhappy years and
go back to my happy years.”
This mention of happiness serves to
highlight the fact that, despite this experience,
and for all his uncompromising conclusions
about British race relations, and the news that
he has had intense therapy (“What did I learn
about myself? I have a habit of beating myself
up. I’ve always had a problem with value”),
Harewood comes across as a decidedly cheerful
man. He laughs when I ask if he thought
about refusing his MBE, awarded in 2012
for his services to drama, as many people of
colour have done for the reference to “empire”.
“Not at all. To be honest, I was in a shit
place and it was actually nice to have a bit of
a day out! My mum was really chuffed. It was
a nice day out and my mum was very proud.”
He says he was content at school: he had
a close group of friends, and their playfulness
was what made him want to become an actor.
He loved Rada too, where he got to play
classic roles from King Lear to characters
written by Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Molière.
But then he emerged into a world where
he was very quickly considered one of the
country’s leading black actors, and the only
thing anyone wanted to ask him about was
race. “I’ve been the only black person in
a room a lot, but at Rada, it was hardly
mentioned. When I came out of drama school,
it was the only thing people were talkingHe has asthma, kidney
disease and hypertension.
‘This virus has my name
written all over it’
With Mandy Patinkin and Claire Danes in HomelandWith his wife and daughters in 2012