Nikki Amuka-Bird interview: 'I love the opportunities of colour-blind casting, but people aren’t colour-blind in real life'

Time traveller: Nikki Amuka-Bird stars in David Copperfield and Avenue 5
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures Ltd
Craig McLean16 January 2020

Space: the final frontier, of sitcoms at least. But if there’s one writer-director who’s happy to boldly go where few comedians have gone before, it’s Armando Iannucci. With his new Sky/HBO comedy series Avenue 5, the creator of convention-rattling TV comedies The Thick of It and Veep, and of big-screen political satires In the Loop and The Death of Stalin, has now turned his hand to sci-fi.

Equally, if there’s a British screen talent capable of making Charles Dickens relevant to the 21st Century, it’s the Hertfordshire-dwelling Glaswegian. Next week sees the release of the director’s whipsmart and pointedly entertaining adaptation of the much-filmed David Copperfield, with Dev Patel in the title role.

And a vital link in these two new screen creations is Nikki Amuka-Bird, the Londoner who stars in both. With Avenue 5 also launching next week, this is very much her centuries-straddling moment, appearing in 19th-century period costume in one, and in futuristic space-travel mode in the other.

“I know!” exclaims the tickled actress. “That’s what I keep saying — Arm [her affectionate name for Iannucci] is the best time machine in the world!”

Lovers of quality drama will recognise Amuka-Bird from many TV shows, whether it’s Neil Cross’s Luther or Hard Sun, or Zadie Smith’s NW. She also starred in the BBC’s 2009 acclaimed Andrea Levy adaptation Small Island, and the corporation’s recent potboiler Gold Digger.

With her two new collaborations with Iannucci, though, this LAMDA graduate and one-time RSC player is finding herself using acting muscles of which she was blithely unaware. “That’s the great thing about Arm: he sees potential in you that you didn’t know you had,” Amuka-Bird tells me over cocktails — virgin, obviously, us being good Dry Januarians — in the Soho Hotel. “I honestly never thought I’d be able to do this stuff. But he asked me if I wanted to come and play. And now I think: what else can I push myself to do? I’m so grateful to Arm. He’s been a game-changer for me.”

Avenue 5 is set aboard a luxury spaceship of the same name that’s taking 5,000 well-heeled future tourists on the trip of a lifetime — which could last almost a lifetime, it turns out, when a gravity malfunction causes the craft to miss a crucial turning on a moon of Saturn.

The “Major Tom” role on this hilarious space oddity is taken by Hugh Laurie, playing the hapless captain. Keeping the whole thing together, though, is Ground Control, which is (wo)manned by Amuka-Bird. Her character Rav Mulcair is armed with a no-nonsense briskness and a gravity-defying, anvil-shaped haircut that she wields like armour.

What the Dickens: Nikki Amuka-Bird in The Personal History of David Copperfield

“The hair is everything!” laughs the 43-year-old long-time West Londoner. “The hair is basically the characterisation,” she goes on, explaining that it was the idea of hair designer Nicole Stafford, with whom she also worked on Gold Digger. “We were looking to the future and how a strong black businesswoman might wear her hair. So we were inspired by Black Panther and the idea of natural hair. So it’s a quintessential bob — but it’s also an Afro power bob.”

There’s an equally innovative cultural mix in Iannucci’s Copperfield adaptation. There’s been much discussion of — and praise for — his colour-blind casting, with the director plainly answering a query from leading man Patel that, no, David Copperfield didn’t have an Indian father. He’s just played by the best actor that Iannucci considered for the role, end of.

Still Amuka-Bird admits that, when she was approached about playing Mrs Steerforth, widowed mother of Copperfield’s schoolfriend James, she wanted to understand the rationale.

“I said to Arm that, as much as I love the opportunities that colour-blind casting brings, when I’m preparing for something, I think it’s safe to assume that people aren’t colour-blind in real life,” she smiles. “So I always try to find the reality of it, and find a hook I can latch on to.”

Accordingly, she dug into Dickens’s big, baggy novel to understand her character. “Mrs Steerforth has a very high status, possibly a higher status than the rest of the characters. So it felt that part of her toughness and lioness quality comes from having to protect herself and her family because she’s still an outsider.”

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Personally, Amuka-Bird — formerly married to actor Geoffrey Streatfeild — states that she feels “very English, very much a Londoner, and very proud to be a Londoner”. But equally she cherishes Nigeria, where she was born and lived until she was five. The other third of her is Antiguan, her maternal roots. She’s just back from her biannual stay at her late mother’s home, where she goes to unplug and decompress.

“But I’m learning more about my Nigerian side,” she says, adding that, as a former dancer, Afrobeat is her jam. “I literally can’t sit still when it comes on. Everyone should have a good dance at least once day,” she thinks, radiating 1,000-watt enthusiasm despite her jetlag and the prospect of flying straight back across the Atlantic after our meeting for the LA launch of Avenue 5.

“It’s a road trip!” is her first cheerful thought. Then she considers the close-knit nature of Iannucci’s theatrical troupe, whom she’s about to join for a drink, and the cocktails may be less than virgin. “Actually, it’ll be more like a school trip,” she decides. More playing, then.

Avenue 5 starts on Sky One and Now TV on January 22. The Personal History of David Copperfield is in cinemas from January 24

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