Wunmi Mosaku is missing Greggs. Specifically, she misses the regional quirks of the British bakery – the Tottenham cakes in London and the Eccles cakes in Manchester. Despite living in Los Angeles for nearly a decade, the 39-year-old actor’s Mancunian accent remains as thick as ever, according to theguardian.com.
Currently, Mosaku is at the centre of an intense awards season whirlwind. Her performance as Annie, a Hoodoo priestess in Ryan Coogler’s vampire thriller Sinners, has made her an outside bet for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. It is a career peak that has catapulted her from gritty British procedurals to Hollywood’s A-list.
Fame, however, has its drawbacks. Mosaku recently announced her second pregnancy in Vogue, a move she initially resisted. “In my Nigerian culture, this news is meant to be protected,” she explains. She felt pressured to go public to pre-empt tabloid speculation, citing the “tax on the spirit” that comes with public life.
Her journey to the red carpet began with a £30 Megabus ticket. Born in Nigeria and raised in Manchester, Mosaku’s parents were academics who struggled to find work in their fields after moving to the UK. Though she nearly pursued a career as a maths professor, a last-minute audition for RADA changed everything. Her mother provided the bus fare for the trip to London; if she hadn’t got in, she would have studied economics at Durham.
Despite her success, Mosaku remains candid about the hurdles she faced in the UK. At RADA, she was the only Black woman in her year and recalls being cast as bit parts rather than leads. “I never got to play an ingénue,” she says. “Teachers make you either bloom or shrivel away.”
It was director Ryan Coogler who finally gave her the space to bloom. While preparing for Sinners, Mosaku delved into Hoodoo and her own Yoruba roots, a culture she felt she had to suppress to “fit in” while growing up in Manchester. She describes the pressure to assimilate as a “cultural genocide,” noting that her parents were discouraged from teaching her Yoruba to avoid “funny accents.”
As for a return to British television, Mosaku is open to it, but with one firm condition: “I just want to make sure that in the UK I’m not always playing a police officer.” With upcoming roles alongside Idris Elba and in Aaron Sorkin’s next project, the Manchester native is finally calling the shots.
•Featured image: Wunmi Mosaku/Gianna Dorsey
