‘I do love a Greggs,” says Wunmi Mosaku, as she settles into a sofa in a hotel in London’s Holborn. She’s extolling the virtues of the high-street baker after I jokingly suggested that’s what she could have for lunch, now she’s back in the UK from her base in Los Angeles. Despite being Stateside for the best part of a decade, she has lost none of her Manchester twang or sense of humour.
“You know what I love about Greggs?” she asks, leaning in. “In each city, they have something specific to that place. So in London, they’ve got the Tottenham cake. Manchester’s got the Eccles cake. In Liverpool, they’ve got the scouse pie. In Newcastle, they’ve got … a ton of breads. You can’t get them anywhere else!”
Mosaku learned all about Greggs’ regional delicacies while touring her first play, straight out of Rada back in 2007. She played “the World” in The Great Theatre of the World, a 17th-century mystery play, and it took her all over the country. As well as acquainting her with the magic of a stotty cake, it was the first step in a career that has reached incredible heights in the last 18 months.
The 39-year-old Mancunian is in the middle of a relentless awards season push, on board the bandwagon for Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s juke joint vampire thriller set in the American deep south of the 1930s. She’s an outside bet for a best supporting female Oscar, meaning she is currently manically zig-zagging the Atlantic. Mosaku’s performance as Annie, a Hoodoo priestess who gives the film its emotional centre, has catapulted her into a new strata of stardom. She may be able to list regional Greggs menus but she also dazzled at the Golden Globes, pregnant in a radiant yellow dress, and has become a regular magazine cover star. After we’re done, she’s off to chat with Graham Norton.
The fame has brought levels of attention that aren’t always welcome. Mosaku announced she was pregnant with her second child in Vogue, to coincide with the Golden Globes – in part to put to bed growing speculation. “In my Nigerian culture,” she wrote, “we don’t really announce this kind of news. It’s meant to be protected. Everything in me resists sharing it publicly – not because I’m not grateful or joyful, but because this feels like one of the few things that truly belongs to me.”
Mosaku managed to hide her first pregnancy while playing the lead in ITV’s supernatural police procedural Passengers (think Happy Valley meets The X-Files). But this time, with the heightened attention brought by Sinners, she was under pressure to announce. “I was really against it,” says Mosaku. “But then I thought, If I’m gonna do it, I want to do it with the caveat that I say, ‘I don’t want to do this, but I feel like I have to because you all comment on our bodies.’” She’d watched her Sinners co-star Hailee Steinfeld endure months of speculation before telling her Instagram followers she was expecting a baby with her husband, NFL star Josh Allen.
This is new territory for Mosaku, who broke through after winning a Bafta for her performance as Damilola Taylor’s mother Gloria in a 2017 BBC drama, before moving to the US, where she has oscillated between Marvel epic Loki and grittier fare, such as David Simon’s 2022 police corruption series We Run This City.
It could all have been so different. Mosaku’s parents, both academics, moved their family to Manchester from Zaria, Nigeria, when Mosaku was one. Later in life, she considered following their path by becoming a maths professor. She had a university place but decided to try acting, and auditioned for Rada instead. Her father wasn’t too enthusiastic but her mother backed the decision. “If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t be here,” says Mosaku matter of factly. Her mother gave her £30, which was enough for her to get to London and back on the Megabus and buy some food.
But the pair made a pact: if Mosaku didn’t get a place at Rada, she’d be off to uni in Durham to study maths and economics. “No one thought I’d get in,” she says, but she impressed the panel by playing Helena from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Queen Margaret from Richard III, and various parts from Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
Moving to London wasn’t easy. Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the south Manchester suburb Mosaku grew up in, might be characterised as a leafy middle-class enclave today, full of BBC execs pushing up house prices, but that wasn’t her family’s experience. Although Mosaku’s parents were academics in Nigeria, in the UK life was very different. Neither could find work in their desired fields of architecture and chemistry – so made do with what they could. Money was in short supply. “We were on the council estate,” says Mosaku. “My mum worked really, really hard. We were definitely one of those families that, if someone rang the doorbell, the kids all hid, because you couldn’t say mum was out at work.”
All this made the move to Rada fraught. Mosaku was the only black girl in her class, something that wasn’t easy at an institution which, in 2020, admitted it was institutionally racist after pressure from former students. Mosaku was one of many talented young actors: her future Loki co-stars Tom Hiddleston and Gugu Mbatha-Raw were there at the same time. But she remembers an environment where some teachers struggled to see her as anything more than a bit player. “I never got a lead role,” she says, recalling the time she was cast as a 50-year-old ship captain. “Never got to play an ingénue.”
She asks: “Why restrict how I imagined my career? I think teachers are the most important people in a person’s life. They make you either bloom or shrivel away. I was really lucky that I had teachers like Bill Gaskell, who made me believe I could bloom, but I had so many people along the way that made me feel like, ‘Oh, this isn’t for you.’”
In Ryan Coogler, she found a kindred spirit. After seeing Mosaku in We Own This City, he thought she’d be perfect as Annie and the pair set up a 30-minute Zoom call that ballooned into an hour-and-a-half heart-to-heart, during which they discussed their motivations and the people who inspired them. “We bonded on our first Zoom about those teachers, the ones who really put you on the path and the ones who nearly got you off it.” (Coogler brought his college professor Rosemary Graham, who told him he should write scripts in Hollywood, to a recent awards show.)
Actors often peddle the same few well-polished anecdotes on the awards-season merry-go-round, heaping praise on colleagues. But when Mosaku is asked about Annie, she speaks about it as a transformational experience, like a religious convert testifying to the unanointed.
To prepare for her role as Annie, who loses a child with one of Michael B Jordan’s twin characters, Mosaku studied Hoodoo, which has its roots in the traditional Yoruba religion brought to America by enslaved Africans. This led to a deep connection with her Yoruba roots – and the language she began learning five years ago finally started to click for her. She likens the experience to an archeologist slowly unearthing a long lost civilisation during an excavation. “Oh,” she said to herself. “This is where I’m from. This is who I am. This is part of my survival.” The other thing that dawned on her was just how detached she had become from her own culture.
Mosaku puts this down to her upbringing in Manchester. She should already be fluent in Yoruba, but her parents were discouraged from teaching their children the language because it would give them “funny accents”. For Mosaku, who has played immigrants throughout her career, that is the steep price new arrivals pay: people are asked to cut off parts of their own culture to “fit in”.
“That’s the stuff that’s really important,” she says, becoming noticeably moved. “You don’t appreciate the cost to people, the tax on a person’s spirit in order to assimilate into your country – and for what? It’s superiority. It’s ego. It’s brutal. It’s a cultural genocide.”
Does she see herself ever coming back to the UK? “A lot of people make me excited about working in the UK,” she says, listing director Akinola Davies Jr, Joan Iyiola’s Apatan Productions and Bolu Babalola. “I never take my eye off the UK for work,” she adds. “Artistically, I do feel like the work in America has been more satiating. I just want to make sure that in the UK I’m not always playing a police officer, you know?”
Ahead are roles in Apple’s This Is How It Goes, alongside Idris Elba, and a part in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, his follow-up to The Social Network. The jury is still out on whether the UK can keep up, but if she does decide to come back, Greggs will be waiting.
Sinners is available to buy or rent now
