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‘Being told you should conform to one type of beauty is so outdated,’ declares Gugu Mbatha-Raw down the phone to ELLE UK. ‘But, I think we’re getting better at celebrating individuality,’ the actor concludes. It’s Sunday morning and we’re catching up with the Loki star, UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and presenter of one of tonight’s BAFTA 2023 awards to talk all things beauty. Despite spending what could have been a well-earned weekend lie in being interviewed by us, Mbatha-Raw is what can only be described as a delight. Gracious, chatty and hyper intelligent, with a sprightly laugh that bubbles over every other sentence, we’d happily call her every Sunday morning. If she’d let us.
The British actor’s pre-11am optimism is infectious; whether she’s speaking on limited beauty standards or championing a wider pool of talent in the film industry, her enthusiasm never wavers. ‘I’m so excited to see my friend Gina Prince-Bythewood nominated for Best Director – as a woman, as a woman of colour, and as someone I’ve worked with, it’s been amazing to see her go from strength to strength. Heroing female directors is definitely an area of the industry that has a way to go.’
Ahead of the evening’s festivities,
we chatted joyful beauty, lipstick stashes and why Audrey Hepburn is her forever beauty icon…What does beauty mean to you?
‘I try to think about beauty being something you can express that comes from a place of joy and lets you be your best self. I definitely feel more comfortable with beauty now than when I was younger, maybe because I feel more confident in myself and more established in my career. As an actor I think beauty can be a bit of a double edged sword; I want to be able to play characters that are flawed and messy and human, you have to be unafraid to be not beautiful, you have to be bold enough to be real as well, and I think there’s beauty in that authenticity. But, I also work in an industry that celebrates beauty and is, by its nature, a visual medium.’ [More at Source]
I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Gugu attending the 2023 EE BAFTA Film Awards in London.
I’ve update the gallery with photos of Gugu attending the “60 Years Of James Bond” Celebration in London.
Last night, actress and former Tatler cover star, Gugu Mbatha-Raw MBE, made her way to Sloane Street for a glitzy discussion at Giorgio Armani’s London flagship. Merely one week since the store’s marble-adorned, enviably chic store played host to Armani/Casa’s Frieze party, the Italian luxury powerhouse’s gleaming Knightbridge haunt was the perfect setting for a conversation with author Yomi Adegoke.
Focusing the discussion on Mbatha’s experience in the film industry, a select few of London’s social set were called upon to attend the event, titled ‘Crossroads Conversations’. Celebrating the second season of similar events hosted by Giorgio Armani, Mbatha-Raw joins the likes of ballet dancer and director Aurélie Dupont, Michelin-Starred chef Vicky Lau, and activist Kristina Lunz on the impressive roster of invited speakers. Guests enjoyed champagne, Aperol Spritz and delectable canapés as they listened to her insightful and impressive anecdotes.
‘For me it always starts with the script. It is the first piece of contact I have for a role. After years and years of reading scripts and stories you get a feel for them,’ said the actress on choosing a role. ‘For me, my rule is to try and do things I have not done before. Not to repeat myself. After doing two psychological thrillers back-to-back, I then did a lighter, heist action movie with Kevin Hart and for me that was a refreshing choice because I think you cannot do the deep dark psychological stuff all of the time. You need to restore yourself with different genres.’
One of her favourite roles saw the movie maven play Egyptian Queen Cleopatra on stage in back in 2005. ‘[She] is my idol and I had always wanted to play her. She is such a powerful and iconic woman in history,’ Mbatha-Raw explained, ‘In terms of the wardrobe of Cleopatra, I certainly had to do my research. I think ancient Egypt is such an interesting period that hasn’t been explored recently on film and I feel like there is such a scope for a costume designer to build that world. There is so much texture to that world.’ [More at Source]
I’ve updated the gallery with Gugu’s appearances in Paul & Joe and ERDEM shows in London Fashion Week.
I’ve updated the gallery with HQ stills & screencaptures of Gugu in Apple TV’s Surface. The show was supposed to be a limited series but the way the finale ended implied that we might get a season 2.
I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Gugu attending the Edward Enninful OBE & Friends Celebrate “A Visible Man” At Claridge’s.
I’ve updated the gallery with photos of Gugu attending the first ever SOHO House Awards ceremony.
When Gugu Mbatha-Raw first received the script for Surface, she was in Atlanta, filming the first season of Loki—about to become an enormous hit for the still-building Disney+ platform. It was the late summer of 2020, and she was content, if not exactly challenged, in the iron-pressed shirt collar and necktie of Ravonna Renslayer. She ached for an opportunity to stretch stiff muscles, especially as the pandemic continued the squeeze the television industry.
“I had a great experience on Loki,” she tells me when we meet for lunch in Midtown Manhattan this July. “But I think the Marvel world is a particular genre. So it was very refreshing to me to read Surface at the time, because it was so different to what I was working on.”
She already had a connection to the production company behind Surface: Hello Sunshine, co-founded by Mbatha-Raw’s The Morning Show cast-mate Reese Witherspoon. From Atlanta, she Zoomed with Surface showrunner Veronica West, with Witherspoon herself, and with Hello Sunshine President of Film & TV Lauren Neustadter. Together, they took the pitch to Apple, “and they pretty much bought it right away,” Mbatha-Raw says.
By Thanksgiving of 2020, a writers’ room was at work, and by June 2021, Mbatha-Raw was on set in Vancouver, in the lead role of Sophie, an amnesiac struggling to make sense of her life and relationships after a presumed suicide attempt leaves her without memories. As an executive producer as well as actress for Surface, she’d had a heavy hand in everything from Sophie’s musical tastes to who would play her co-stars, including Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Sophie’s husband, James, and Ari Graynor as her friend Caroline. As such, Mbatha-Raw’s tastes are felt throughout the series; her, as she puts it, “British sensibility” adds gloss and dimension to what might otherwise feel—if you’ll forgive me—a mere surface-level investigation of monied myth-making.
As the series speeds toward its finale, critics have widely deemed Mbatha-Raw as the standout in an otherwise mixed reception. Her face—Sophie’s face—contorts as she learns new details about her past lives, but even more so as she learns how to harness those details. Surface’s protagonist is not innocent, neither before nor after her accident, and the thrill of connecting those two threads is most evident in Mbatha-Raw’s performance, as she spins the wheels of reinvention behind Sophie’s tony exterior.
In a wide-ranging conversation ahead of the Surface premiere, I learned how Mbatha-Raw poured both her practical and artistic skills into Surface, what she hopes for the future of the series, and how her time on Loki has informed her future creative endeavors. [More at Source]
The narrative conceit of a character that awakens from a supposed suicide attempt with no memory or sense of their former identity is a fairly delectable proposition for any actor and one that is evidently particularly well suited to Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The actor’s propensity for subtly nerve-shredded existential angst is amply showcased in Surface—the current Apple TV+ show predicated upon precisely the aforementioned proposition.
The increasingly celebrated thespian in Mbatha-Raw is properly in her element in the slow-burning psychological thriller. Surface spins upon the central axis of a woman named Sophie (played by Mbatha-Raw) whose seemingly high-end affluent life in San Francisco turns out to be a scattered jigsaw puzzle of deceit, debt, love triangles, and, perhaps even, murder most foul. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the Oxfordshire-born actor, who first came to the attention of the world for her sterling performance in the game-changing costume drama Belle, and was most recently on our screens as a sinister time-policing bureaucrat in the surreal Disney+ Marvel spin-off, Loki, jumped at the chance to play such an enticing role. “Surface came to me through the Hello Sunshine company, who I worked with on The Morning Show, and I knew if they were doing it, that it would be quality because an ethos of centering strong female roles in the narrative is in their DNA,” says Mbatha-Raw, with infectious enthusiasm down a crackling phone line from Belfast, Ireland, where she is currently holed-up on-set of new project, Lift.
“When I read Veronica West’s pilot script [for Surface], it just really drew me in as a mystery. I thought it was so compelling because it placed you right inside my character’s head—a woman who it seems has a perfect life, before the cracks begin to show,” continues the actor of British and South African parentage, whose eye for a good character is inarguably keen, given she has been awarded an MBE for services to drama. “There is this kind of noir element to the story, and I got drawn into the mystery of this love triangle, but also by the fact that I hadn’t really ever seen a woman in a memory story, you know? We have all seen things like The Bourne Identity, and thrillers that have a man at the center of finding out who they are, or what they have done—but I just thought that this being about a woman was intriguing.”
It’s a salient point that memory loss is a pretty well-trodden trope in the history of cinema, having deep roots in the likes of the classic Hitchcock thriller Spellbound and the truly excellent Memento from Christopher Nolan, but it’s fair to say that it is sadly more than a little unusual for the key protagonist to be female (the incomparable Mulholland Drive being the most obvious exception), and, perhaps just as pertinently, it is not a narrative we have seen packaged into the zeitgeist mold of the mini-series before. “There is something about being able to go into an intimate character-driven story like this that you can’t necessarily get on the big screen, because you get to spend eight hours with all these characters and go to deep psychological depths,” says Mbatha-Raw, when I ask her if she has any concerns about the ubiquitous streaming format in general, given that, well, at least in the opinion of this writer, a good deal of shows can sometimes seem just a little too long, and oftentimes unwieldy. “I think there is a comfort in returning episode after episode to a character, and in getting to really explore the nuances of the story,” she continues. “Also, this is just six episodes, so it feels like a tight package. Hopefully, as a viewer, you are on the edge of your seat, and trying to work out the mystery, but there are also some very interesting questions of trust being raised on the way—you can’t always rely on your senses to give you an accurate picture of the outside world, and thereby your inner world.” [More at Source]
