Feature: Gugu Mbatha-Raw for The Financial Times

 

Sophie, a wealthy Silicon Valley wife whose hobbies include looking at drawers full of her jewellery and attending champagne galas, proved surprisingly low-maintenance as a role for Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The British actor did not undertake her normal levels of research for the part in new psychological thriller Surface, but that’s not because Sophie is straightforward. Far from it — she is enigmatic, complex and suffering amnesia after plunging from a ferry into the sea.

“The character was starting off very much a blank slate,” Mbatha-Raw says over Zoom from a hotel room in New York. “I’m building Sophie as she’s building herself, as we’re experiencing her on screen. It was liberating . . . the acting [had] to stay open and . . . open-eyed, absorbing the world.” 

Sophie is also trying to figure out what would make her attempt suicide. “At the beginning she is quite vulnerable, looking to the men in her life to tell her who she is and to define her,” Mbatha-Raw says. There’s a particular tension with her husband, James (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) — “Is he very loving or is it verging into control?” As the mystery deepens, Sophie reasons she didn’t jump but was pushed.

While the amnesiac role required less research, the show, directed by Sam Miller (I May Destroy You), demanded more of Mbatha-Raw because she was involved behind the scenes as an executive producer. The 39-year-old was lured by the “big draw” of Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, which made the big-budget Apple TV series The Morning Show (in which Mbatha-Raw also had a prominent role). She was attracted by its mission to create “female-centred stories and empowering women”. [More at Source]

Feature: Gugu Mbatha-Raw for The New York Times

A few minutes into “Surface,” a new eight-part series from Apple TV+, the central character, Sophie, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, asks her therapist a question:

“If my life was so perfect, why did I try to end it?”

Sophie, who has amnesia after a suicide attempt, has a handsome, wealthy and devoted husband, a World of Interiors-worthy townhouse with a panoramic view of San Francisco, a fun best-girlfriend and a killer wardrobe. She is also beautiful — obviously, since she is played by Mbatha-Raw, the British actress who rose to prominence playing the title role in Amma Asante’s 2014 feature “Belle.”

Mbatha-Raw, 39, has worked prolifically in film and television over the past decade, with starring roles in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Beyond the Lights,” the Marvel series “Loki” and, most recently, the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.”

But with “Surface,” which will premiere on Friday, Mbatha-Raw is leading a major series for the first time, and also stepping into new terrain as an executive producer of the show, created and written by Veronica West (“High Fidelity,” 2020).

Sophie’s question is the driving force of the show, which West said was inspired by the 1962 Alain Resnais film “Last Year at Marienbad.” Why did Sophie try to kill herself? Did she try to kill herself?

In a recent interview at a London hotel, Mbatha-Raw said she was drawn to “the fact that Sophie herself is the mystery,” adding, “There are amnesia dramas, but I hadn’t seen this with a woman who looks like me at the center.”

The role, she said, had forced her to abandon her usual scrupulous preparation for playing a character. “She is a blank slate, she is looking for clues, and her information comes from those around her,” Mbatha-Raw said. “It was the opposite of creating a back story; here I was building the character as Sophie is building herself throughout the show.”

It was strange to work on playing a married couple when only one character knows the history of the relationship, said Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays James, Sophie’s husband. “There are so many different versions of Sophie, and so many versions of Sophie and James,” he said in a telephone interview. “But that’s true of our lives.”

Sophie exists in “two realities,” said Ari Graynor, who plays her best friend, Caroline. “The external reality she is interacting with, and her internal reality of trying to put everything together. Gugu has a gift of allowing both these realities to be simultaneously felt with layers of sensitivity and subtlety and precision.” [More at Source]

Coverage: Inside Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s First Milan Fashion Week

Gugu has done it and with 2022 we saw her attending her first International Fashion Week during the busiest 2 weeks of my life and what beautiful looks she have blessed us with! Instead of doing multiple posts I decided to put it all one in master post for everyone to browse at their own pace.

In total, Gugu have attended 3 different fashion shows and we got both inside & outside photos from every show on top of the British Vogue coverage that I ended up splitting into 2 different sets, so let’s dig in.

February 27: Gugu attended the Giorgio Armani show, check out the street style photos and Gugu getting ready courtesy of British Vogue.

  
February 28: Gugu getting ready for the Armani Crossroad Dinner.

March 01: Gugu attended the Dior show, we have street style photos and Front Row shots.

March 03: Gugu attended the Chloe show, we have street style photos and Front Row shots.

Feature: Gugu Mbatha-Raw & Jessica Plummer for Interview Magazine

There’s no shortage of weird landlord stories out there, but The Girl Before brings the concept to a whole new level. In it, Gugu Mbatha-Raw (of The Morning Show and Loki) plays Jane, a woman recovering from a recent trauma. She seizes a chance to shed the past—and a lot of her stuff—by moving into a sleek, inexplicably affordable jaw-dropper of a house. The only conditions are that the house will collect data on her (it’s rigged up like a giant “smart” device), and that she must follow a lengthy and exacting list of rules (no gardening, no pictures on the wall, etc.) set by Edward, the home’s mysterious owner and architect [played by David Oyelowo]. In time, Jane learns that Edward has some demons of his own involving the home’s previous tenant Emma [played by Jessica Plummer] who, unsettlingly, turns out to look a lot like Jane.

The four-episode miniseries, based on the best-selling novel by J.P. Delaney (who wrote and executive produced the adaptation) and directed by Lisa Brühlmann (Emmy-nominated for her work on Killing Eve) takes viewers through a harrowing psychological labyrinth filled with twists and turns. But the show was also a head trip for its costars Mbatha-Raw and Plummer, as the cast and crew often struggled to tell the two women apart. Recently, the pair caught up via Zoom, and discussed the eerie feeling of playing doppelgängers, their landlord horror stories, and the show’s recent HBO Max release. — EVELINE CHAO

GUGU MBATHA-RAW: You read a lot of psychological thrillers?

JESSICA PLUMMER: Yeah, it’s my go-to genre. Normally it takes me a few days to get through a script, but this one, I literally sat down and read in one sitting.

MBATHA-RAW: It’s such a page-turner, isn’t it? I love that the show has two female leads, which is so refreshing. And it’s stylish, but has substance. It looks really glossy and cool, with the clothes and the house and the architecture, but the characters have all of these deep, emotional things going on.

PLUMMER: Absolutely.

MBATHA-RAW: Tell me about the process of getting into Emma. It’s funny, because we never really acted together. So David [Oyelowo] and Ben [Hardy] know your process much more than I do.

PLUMMER: You know what’s so funny? I actually watched an interview you had done, I think ages ago. You spoke about giving your characters a scent, and I was like, oh my god, I’m doing that.

MBATHA-RAW: Wait, you chose a scent for Emma? What was it?

PLUMMER: Jo Malone Lime Basil and Mandarin.

MBATHA-RAW: This is amazing. Jane’s was Le Labo Rose.

PLUMMER: That’s so funny, I almost gave Emma a rose scent.

MBATHA-RAW: Girls connected.

PLUMMER: I know. I thought a rose perfume would be good for Emma, but when I sprayed it on myself, I felt like it needed to have a bit more zing.

MBATHA-RAW: That totally makes sense, because anything citrus has that zing. I feel like Emma, and you naturally, have that vivacious and bright energy. With Le Labo Rose, I wanted something that feels a bit more heavy and sophisticated. Also because of the rose quartz, which both our characters share. [More at Source]

Feature: Gugu Mbatha-Raw for The Tatler

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is on a quest. For a cup of tea. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask: after all, it is mid-afternoon and we have met at the grandest hotel in San Francisco, the Fairmont, which sits atop Nob Hill. She has a word with the concierge who says that unfortunately tea is unavailable at this hour and advises us to try another hotel nearby. So off we go into the sunshine, Mbatha-Raw joking about how hopeless the Americans are at tea anyway: ‘You get hot water and a teabag on the side and they haven’t even taken it out of the wrapping.’

The next hotel, almost equally luxurious, seems to confirm this. ‘Tea?’ asks the host in the lobby café. ‘Of course.’ He directs us towards a hot-water dispenser and some paper cups. Mbatha-Raw and I look at each other, slightly aghast. ‘We’re so British,’ Mbatha-Raw explains politely. ‘Where can we just sit down and get tea?’

‘Ah yes,’ says the host, with just a flicker of a smile. ‘Have a seat and John will be over to serve you your tea.’

At last we are settled comfortably in a corner with a pot of Earl Grey and some milk on the side. The café is quite crowded but, although she is now one of the most high-profile British actresses in the US, Mbatha-Raw goes unnoticed. Dressed in faded grey jeans, a white shirt and a big yellow scarf, she does not draw attention to herself: ‘I’m living out of a suitcase at the moment, so [I just wear] what’s not too crumpled. Normally I’m top to toe in black, so you’ve got me on quite a bright day.’ She is especially pleased with her beige suede Isabel Marant boots. ‘I stole them from The Girl Before [her current BBC series]; they were for [somebody else’s character] and they didn’t fit. So I thought, “As no one’s wearing them…” Hilarious. I don’t often steal things from shows.’

People often can’t quite place her. ‘Sometimes they say, “You’re an actress, aren’t you? What have I seen you in?’ And it’s always cringey because it could be so many things and I don’t really want to stand there and list my whole CV and they’re going, “No, no, no…”’

It’s certainly an impressive CV. There was her breakout role in the award-winning period drama Belle, the riotous Misbehaviour with Keira Knightley, and the neo-noir crime drama Motherless Brooklyn with Alec Baldwin. (Mbatha-Raw and I meet a couple of weeks after he accidentally shot dead a cinematographer, which she describes as ‘a shocking tragedy’.) More recently, she has played celebrity wrangler Hannah in the Apple TV+ drama series The Morning Show, executive-produced by Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon. And she stars in the 2021 Marvel TV series Loki with Tom Hiddleston, who was at Rada at the same time as Mbatha-Raw. [More at Source]