Wunmi Mosaku s glowing. She’s smiling, pregnant with her second child, and soaking up her first go-round on the Oscar circuit. Her BAFTA win is still to come. It should not have been a surprise. Her warm, magnetic performance in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” as Annie, the Hoodoo-practicing wife of natty twin brother Smoke (Michael B. Jordan), is the beating heart of the movie. They have been separated, and they have lost a baby. But their bond is strong.“That is what the movie’s about,” she said over Zoom. “The movie’s about living in your truth. Living in your purpose, living in love. … Or living forever, without the sun, without the connection to the ancestors, and being of this world forever.”
The Manchester actress has come a long way since she applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts — the only drama school she had ever heard of — and got in. It was not easy. She was lonely, far away from home, the only Black woman (alongside three Black men) in her class of 33, which included the likes of Tom Hiddleston. “I had no roadmap,” she said. “The only roadmap I had was Albert Finney from Salford who went to RADA, and that was it. I didn’t want to do Maths and Economics. I Googled the cast of ‘Annie,’ and that’s how I knew about drama school.”
Mosaku was unhappy at RADA. She had expected a more academic university education. “It’s bonkers,” she said. “You’re pretending to be a chameleon, and a horse, and a bull, and then you’re pretending you’re in the enchanted forest. I didn’t get any lead parts, I didn’t get any ingenues. I was playing 50-year-old sea captains, 80-year-old grandmas, and moms. I never got anything in my age range, in my casting bracket either
It was a shock four years later when she landed Joy, the female lead in 2009’s BBC Two miniseries “Moses Jones.” “I had never seen myself as tall, beautiful, desirable,” she said. “[The lead] was never presented to me. My career feels like a surprise to me.” After that she steadily booked more substantial roles. “People felt like they could trust me with the heavier, weightier characters.”
While she auditioned for the first season of “Luther” without a callback, she went on to win a BAFTA for TV film “Damilola, Our Loved Boy” in 2016, and landed a role in “Luther” Season 5 in 2019, Ruby Baptiste in HBO’s “Lovecraft Country” in 2020, and showed her comedy chops as Hunter B-15 (opposite RADA-mate Hiddleston) in Marvel series “Loki” as well as “Deadpool & Wolverine” in 2024.The actress moved to Los Angeles in 2018 when she fell in love. “I met my husband-to-be,” she said. “I am an old romantic. I met him: ‘I think this guy might be the guy.’ And within six months, I had given up my place in London. ‘I’m going to give it a shot and just see how long it lasts.’
It wasn’t a bad career move. “I’d have done it no matter where he lived, to be honest,” she said.On the promo circuit Mosaku is proud of her fellow Brit and Oscar nominee Delroy Lindo. “England can be a tough place to live as a person of color,” she said, “especially in Delroy’s day, and even up until the ’80s and ’90s. He was born in the UK, but he was given the opportunities in the U.S., and his career was nurtured there. It’s hard sometimes coming back and you go, ‘We’re celebrating me now!’ You feel like screaming into the void: ‘See me. Value me.’”
She only learned on the last day of production on “Sinners” during Coogler’s goodbye cast and crew speech that the writer-director had seen her in a trailer for Reinaldo Marcus Green’s “We Own This City.” There was one moment, Coogler said, that stood out to him in what “was probably the shortest screen time, shortest audition ever,” said Mosaku, “Because that was the thing that made him go, ‘She might be my Annie,’ and so he kept me in mind whilst continuing writing.
She still had to audition for the role. “He didn’t know me.” A few days after a long Zoom meeting with Coogler, Mosaku did a chemistry read with Michael B. Jordan. They cast her in the room. “I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before that
During production, Mosaku always knew when she was in a space with Smoke or Stack. “It was like night and day for me,” she said of Jordan’s performance as twins. “I could hear in the cadence of his voice, his walk if he was Stack or if he was Smoke. Stack had dimples, and Smoke didn’t. And that wasn’t makeup, that was the way he held his face. Smoke’s eyes feel like they hang low, and Stack’s are so bright. I could tell with my back turned if he was Smoke or Stack just by the way he entered the room. He and I were magnets when he was Smoke. We were always in each other’s orbit. I was always by him, behind him, his support. On opposite sides of the room, I felt locked into him when he was Smoke.”
Losing their daughter is always present for Annie and Smoke. “Their daughter went ahead of them,” she said. “Even though it’s the wrong way around. No parent should ever lose a child. Because they did, they now share this ancestor. And they’re forever connected and tied to each other. And that love, it’s boundless. It’s expansive. It’s … peace, actually. They’re different, but their love is their safe place, as long as there’s truth and understanding. That’s all that they require from each other.”ì
On the New Orleans shoot, Mosaku brought her young baby and suddenly went from breastfeeding to pumping and bottle-feeding. The stress of that transition sent her into a panic one morning and she had to start late. “I just needed to take her to the park, I just needed time with me and her,” she said. Then she cut herself chopping vegetables. “I was moving too fast, and the knife slipped, and I cut my thumb open, and ended up spending my two hours off in urgent care. It was a shock to the system going back to work like that, and thankfully, it was a supportive set.”
Going in, Moskau knew nothing about Hoodoo. She had only heard of Voodoo. “When I was doing my research, my mom was a little bit scared,” she said. “I’m a Yoruba woman, but I was raised in the UK. I thought it was an evil thing. I was told to stay clear of it.”
As she learned more about the Hoodoo faith system, which is a derivative of the traditional Yoruba spiritual practice of Ifá and rooted in natural herbs and roots, she was taken aback “by how colonized my thinking was, because I thought it was negative,” she said. “When I met these priestess women, and they explained their faith, their practice, these women are real healers, community pillars, with wisdom and knowledge of the earth, and also the divine, conduits of that connection between the ancestors, the present, and the future. I found a piece of myself. It unlocked something in me, a connection to my motherland, and my mother tongue.”
Mosaku had been steadying the Yoruba language since 2020, and suddenly found it coming much more easily, she said. “I had whole conversations in Yoruba, and I’d never been able to do that before.”Next up: She’s busy: “This Is How It Goes” stars her old castmate Idris Elba, she’s in Aaron Sorkin’s sequel “The Social Reckoning,” and Tim Blake Nelson’s prison drama “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd” opposite Amanda Seyfried.
