If you look at Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s acting career, it takes a while for a pattern to emerge. She first gained attention at 22 as Juliet opposite Andrew Garfield’s Romeo at the renowned Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. In the criminally overlooked romantic drama Beyond the Lights, by Gina Prince-Bythewood (who made the infamous Love & Basketball over a decade ago), Mbatha-Raw played a struggling pop star. Her “sleeper hit” Belle tells the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, an illegitimate biracial woman brought up as an orphaned member of her father’s aristocratic family. And in her upcoming Oscar bid, Free State of Jones, she stars alongside Matthew McConaughey as a slave fighting for her freedom.

What all these parts have in common: They’re nuanced and ambitious, roles for someone who’s not content to just be the girlfriend or the wife. She talked with the Cut about forging her own path, making it in Hollywood, and what she’s most grateful for. [Source]

   

Gallery Update

Interview

Photoshoot

Sorry for the delay everyone as I had some problems with the site access. I’ve updated the gallery with the latest shoots and scans that featured Gugu.

   

Photo Sessions > 2016 > Set 002 
Photo Sessions > 2016 > Set 003
Digital Scans > January 2016, Vanity Fair
Digital Scans > May 2016 – Marie Claire

Digital Scans

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

Gugu & some of Hollywood’s best actresses landed the cover of Vanity Fair’s 2016 Hollywood issue.

   

“Gugu” is short for “Gugulethu,” which is Zulu for “Our Pride,” and if, as some Jungian analysts believe, destiny and identity are kerneled in one’s name, well, here you go—what more proof is needed? Pride defines the aura of her performances, an observant bearing that occupies its own quiet place, even in the frantic thick of a phantasmagoria such as the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending. Born in Oxford, England, a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Mbatha-Raw began her climb on popular series such asMI-5 and Doctor Who, achieving first-class status on the movie screen with starring roles in Belle, a drama set in the 18th century about the mixed-race daughter of an admiral in the Royal Navy and her anomalous place in the drawing rooms of the wigged aristocracy, and Beyond the Lights, a pop-music romance about a superstar for whom success is a gilded cage. She also teamed with Will Smith inConcussion, the sports procedural and moral inquiry into the spate of brain injuries in the N.F.L. produced by heavy-impact helmet-to-helmet head butts and the league’s effort to look the other way. There’s no looking the other way when she’s on-screen. [Source]

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

Gugu looks amazing on the cover of Modern Luxury: Angeleno next issue. I’ve updated the gallery with the photoshoot that Gugu did for the magazine:

   

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

Gugu attended earlier today the press conference of Concussion in Los Angeles. You can check it out by clicking on the preview below:

   

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

Gugu was part of a photoshoot done for “The Best of American Designers“, you can check it out by clicking on the preview:

   

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

It’s been six years since Mbatha-Raw last trod the boards. But then, she was spoiled by a peach of a part: Ophelia to Jude Law’s Hamlet, in the West End and on Broadway. It was such “an extraordinary adventure” that offers since have seemed underwhelming, she confesses. “I’ve been doing films and TV, but theatre-wise, nothing else had come along that felt like it could top that … except for this!” [more at source]

Gallery Update

News

Photoshoot

I’ve updated the site with some missing photoshoots from 2014 & some new ones from the last few months, check them out by clicking on the preview below:

    

   

Gallery Update

Photoshoot

I’ve updated the site with a newly released photoshoot that Gugu did in 2014 for GQ Britain. You can check it out by clicking on the thumbnails below:

   

Gallery Update

Photoshoot