Danai Gurira on Her High-Stakes Turn as Richard III

In high school, Gurira played Laertes in a production of Hamlet, and studied for her A Levels in English. When it came to college, though, there was no doubt that she would return to the U.S., as her siblings had done before her, for the more open-​ended exploration that American higher education offers. She majored in psychology at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has described that period—​improvising recipes in the dining hall, hanging out with her then boyfriend in her luxuriously large single room, summoning outrage over political injustice—as “the time of my life.”

One quickly gets the sense in speaking with Gurira that she is a performer who thinks and engages deeply with the world. A playwright and screenwriter as well as an actor, she has a passion for elevating Black and African voices, and even—in what seems like her nonexistent free time—is the executive artistic director of Almasi Collaborative Arts, an organization that stages readings, conferences, and other events to promote the dramatic arts in Zimbabwe. Her current reading includes Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King, Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, Cicely Tyson’s memoir Just as I Am, and Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, an examination of where economic-​development funds go wrong—that last book is research for one of her long-​simmering writing projects she won’t discuss for fear of jeopardizing the precarious development process for TV and film. (Gurira was adapting Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah for the screen, with Lupita Nyong’o set to star, until the project was scuttled by the pandemic.) “If I was thinking about theater rather than film and television for all these years, I’d probably have written three new plays by now,” she admits.

It was as a double-threat playwright and actor that Gurira first gained a foothold in the performing arts. Her debut play, which she performed in and cowrote, In the Continuum, began as a grad school project at New York University that she cocreated with her classmate Nikkole Salter. From there she would write several more, including the Tony-winning Eclipsed, starring Nyong’o—the first work on Broadway to have an entirely Black and female cast, director, and playwright.

“The fact that she’s a hybrid, a writer-​actor,” says Richard’s director, Robert O’Hara, himself a writer-​director, “is very exciting.” O’Hara first met Gurira when she was still at NYU and was immediately taken with her. “I knew from the very beginning she was special,” he says. The Public Theater’s artistic director, Oskar Eustis, also encountered Gurira through NYU, and was similarly affected: “The world has now seen it on film,” he says. More recently, he’s put her on the Public’s board. “She’s technically my boss. I thought that was the best way of keeping her close.”