Actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw: ‘It’s nice not to be encouraged to stay in your lane’

Sophie, a wealthy Silicon Valley wife whose hobbies include looking at drawers full of her jewellery and attending champagne galas, proved surprisingly low-maintenance as a role for Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The British actor did not undertake her normal levels of research for the part in new psychological thriller Surface, but that’s not because Sophie is straightforward. Far from it — she is enigmatic, complex and suffering amnesia after plunging from a ferry into the sea.

“The character was starting off very much a blank slate,” Mbatha-Raw says over Zoom from a hotel room in New York. “I’m building Sophie as she’s building herself, as we’re experiencing her on screen. It was liberating . . . the acting [had] to stay open and . . . open-eyed, absorbing the world.” 

Sophie is also trying to figure out what would make her attempt suicide. “At the beginning she is quite vulnerable, looking to the men in her life to tell her who she is and to define her,” Mbatha-Raw says. There’s a particular tension with her husband, James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) — “Is he very loving or is it verging into control?” As the mystery deepens, Sophie reasons she didn’t jump but was pushed.

While the amnesiac role required less research, the show, directed by Sam Miller (I May Destroy You), demanded more of Mbatha-Raw because she was involved behind the scenes as an executive producer. The 39-year-old was lured by the “big draw” of Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, which made the big-budget Apple TV series The Morning Show (in which Mbatha-Raw also had a prominent role). She was attracted by its mission to create “female-centred stories and empowering women”. 

Executive-producing gave Mbatha-Raw “a chance to flex a different muscle” on set. “As an actor, you show up on the day.” By contrast, executive producing was “a marathon, because your job doesn’t just end when the show wraps”: you’ve already helped develop the scripts and choose the collaborators, then after filming there’s the edit, post-production and more.

Mbatha-Raw was born in 1983 to a South African doctor father who had campaigned against apartheid before leaving for the UK with her mother, a nurse from England. She was brought up in the pretty market town of Witney in Oxfordshire and, after her parents’ divorce, channelled her energy into dancing and performing. “Being an only child, it was just a great way to hang out with friends and express myself. It gave me a sense of community, and fun and playfulness.”

After school, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in the early 2000s. “I loved it. I was dying to move to London from about the age of 12 just to be somewhere with buzz, close to the theatre and all the cultural experiences.” It taught her “about my instrument, my physicality, my voice, how to look after myself as a performer”.

She has worked consistently since leaving Rada, starting with minor parts in TV series, then Ophelia opposite Jude Law’s Hamlet in the West End; her breakout role was in the 2013 period drama Belle. Directed by Amma Asante, it tells the true story of Dido Belle, the illegitimate mixed-race daughter of a slave and an aristocrat who is raised by her uncle in the sumptuous surroundings of Kenwood House, north London. Mbatha-Raw had been doggedly pushing for the role for years, against much competition, to star in a film that deftly wove the themes of race and gender alongside scenes of formal balls and empire-line dresses. It provided a fresh perspective on the taffeta-draped staple of the British entertainment industry.

That industry still has a long way to go when it comes to race. In 2020, Mbatha-Raw signed an open letter demanding an end to systemic racism in the sector and calling on it to hire and promote black and ethnic minority talent. A report that year found that only 5.9 per cent of people working behind the scenes on British dramas were black and or from an ethnic minority.

Has anything changed in the two years since the letter circulated? Mbatha-Raw does not want to be drawn on the industry as a whole, preferring to speak from her own experience: “Having a seat at the table as a producer enables you to push those conversations [about diversity] . . . If you have ideas, then it’s nice not to be gently encouraged to stay in your lane. You can contribute to the evolution of the project.”

Like Sophie in Surface, there is something unknowable about Mbatha-Raw. Throughout our conversation, she refuses to be pinned down on contentious or personal issues — she wants to address inequities in the industry but will not say if she has witnessed them; she wants to be heard but will not be drawn on whether she has felt silenced in the past. When I ask her about her friendship with Prince, she only says that he was “a beautiful soul . . . an incredibly gifted artist”. Her favourite Prince song? “Kiss.” It’s an inoffensive choice.

She lives in Los Angeles, the heart of the entertainment world, but says streaming services have expanded opportunities across the world. “It’s not really about America versus England. I’m about to do Loki in the UK. I just did an American movie in Belfast. Streaming platforms have globalised entertainment.” The Marvel series Loki, a spin-off of the Thor films, in which she will reprise her role as Judge Ravonna Renslayer for the second series, also stars her Rada peers Tom Hiddleston and Wunmi Mosaku. She has also just wrapped the comedy heist film Lift, in which she appears opposite Kevin Hart, for Netflix.

That range of roles is important. “I don’t think anybody is just one thing. There’s a tendency in our culture to oversimplify people or label things so that we cannot continue to investigate them. I’m a multi-faceted, complex person, like everyone on the planet.” She wants the chance to explore “all these different sides of myself . . . and stretch myself and have the opportunity to play. That’s what acting is really.”

‘Surface’ is on Apple TV from July 29