“At drama school, a visiting tutor told me I have an ‘insignificant voice’,” says Susan Wokoma. “I was like, f**king hell, how is that helpful?”
Since those days at Rada, Wokoma has done her very best to prove that teacher wrong. The 35-year-old’s soft, husky, south-east London-accented tones might not always be loud, but they’re completely captivating.
That’s whether she’s playing a neurotic Christian in Michaela Coel’s 2015-2017 comedy Chewing Gum, a fiercely feminist jiu-jitsu teacher in Netflix’s Enola Holmes films, an inconveniently lovestruck journalist last year in BBC One’s Cheaters or a range of adorable moggies in the BBC’s forthcoming Christmas adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s children’s book Tabby McTat.
“I started out doing radio plays, and even won an audio drama award,” Wokoma explains, as she talks me through her path into acting after her studies finished. “I was like, should I tell that tutor? Nah, I’ll be classy. But I’m so glad I kept on with it because now I get to play cats in cartoons and that’s just so dreamy.”
We’re in the airy bar of Chichester Festival Theatre, where Wokoma is attempting a post-show egg sandwich as a stream of locals bustle up to compliment her on her performance (and on the purple silk jumpsuit she is wearing). Wokoma is currently starring in Never Have I Ever, the first play by comedian and The Guilty Feminist podcast host Deborah Frances-White.
It’s an explosive watch, following two couples as they play a dangerous drinking game that exposes the hidden faultlines in their relationships – and one that gives Wokoma a rare chance to air her politics in a role that’s full of fight and confidence. She plays a wealthy feminist journalist who smacks down her performatively-woke husband, and argues that her privilege doesn’t make her immune to racism.
“One of the reasons I fell out of love with theatre before this was that I was so bored of being given one line about my character’s existence, or being secondary to men,” says Wokoma, who has returned to the stage after a four-year hiatus. “But here, we’re all given space, and we get to talk about thorny issues of race and class.”
Chichester Festival Theatre’s audience is (on my visit anyway) significantly older and whiter than the characters on stage – The Crown’s Greg Wise plays Wokoma’s on-stage husband, while television actors Amit Shah and Alex Roach star as the other couple in the story.
Still, as Wokoma explains, “I made a real assumption about how they’d take to it, but then the first night was a standing ovation. They’ve been so game! These guys were around in the 60s and 70s, so are we really shocking them?”
And although Wokoma is harbouring hopes the play has a longer life, she’s also happy that it’s bringing its arguments about identity politics, race, class and wealth to Chichester. “Deborah didn’t want to just preach to the converted, she wanted to find a space where she’d actually change minds, and I think we’re doing that.”
Wokoma is also hoping to change minds with her own writing debut, Three Weeks, a film that starts shooting this autumn. “My instinct is always to deal with things through comedy, so I wanted to make something about motherhood, and not wanting kids,” she explains. Wokoma started writing it six years ago, at the age of 29, and since then the ideas in it have begun to feel more urgent.
“Everyone in my circle is suddenly thinking about parenthood and those conversations are really emotional. Going through a whole lockdown gave me the time to think about the reasons why I don’t want to be a parent, and actually they’re not as girlbossy as ‘I’m going to do what I want!’.
“It’s more that I just understand the seriousness of bringing someone into the world. I think it’s really dangerous to just assume that everyone should become a parent. Some interrogation of that is healthy.”
Although Wokoma is a successful actor by any standards, she’s also very aware of the economic realities of becoming a mother.
“I’ve only just scraped together enough to get my own home, where would I put a baby?” she jokes. “It would go in the sink. It would go in under-bed storage. It makes me angry that people legitimately can’t afford parenthood. It means that only a certain income bracket can carry on their lineage and I think that’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”
Her vehemence comes from her own experiences growing up in south London’s Elephant and Castle to Nigerian-born parents (her mother was a cleaner, her father worked a succession of jobs).
“Being someone who grew up in poverty, I think it’s compassionate to think about how that would impact a child, because it certainly impacted us. Children don’t just bounce back, all adults I know are in some way or another healing from their childhood.”
Wokoma scrambled her own way into acting, against her father’s wishes. At the age of 14, she applied for and got a part in CBBC’s Serious Jungle, which followed eight children returning orangutans to the wild, deep in the forests of Borneo.
Training with the National Youth Theatre and at Rada followed, then a hectic schedule of acting work at theatres including the Royal Court, the National and Donmar Warehouse, as well as small roles in The Inbetweeners 2 (2014), and Phoebe Waller-Bridge‘s debut television show Crashing (2016). It was only when lockdown hit that she started to reassess her relentless schedule.
“It sounds arrogant but I’ve stopped auditioning,” she explains. “It’s not because I’m up myself, it’s more because like lots of people in lots of different industries, my relationship with work has changed, I give 110 per cent to what I’m doing, so I want to make sure I’m putting my energy in the right places.”
Right now, that means dreaming up more of her own film projects. “Unfortunately I’m destined to make films,” she mock-laments. “That’s depressing because getting them off the ground is so hard that it’s going to take all my life trying to do it, but it’s also exciting.”
But among the slog there’s also a new source of joy, courtesy of her role in the 16th season of Taskmaster, which returns to Channel 4 tomorrow and in which Wokoma will join the long line of comedians who have tried their luck in Alex Horne and Greg Davies’s succession of absurd tasks.
“I had the best time working on it,” she says. “You walk into a room genuinely not knowing what’s going to happen and there’s a giddiness that comes with that.”
Wokoma has always played funny roles, but now she’s working alongside some of comedy’s biggest names – the line-up includes the likes of Sue Perkins and Julian Clary. “I grew up watching Julian Clary but I didn’t let on, I had to play it so cool and be like” – she adopts a chilly tone – “you’re my colleague”.
Her standout moment in the series was teaming up with Perkins to run a Fawlty Towers-style hotel (she whips out her phone to show me a cryptic text from Perkins that reads, “I’m still laughing about the chocolate trousers”). “
It was legitimately one of the best days of my life,” she says. “I love being an actor but the fact I can segue into something like this where I’m just constantly bent over with laughter was genuinely a highlight for me.”
Often, the path from theatre to screen comedy is a one-way conveyor belt. “There’s quite a lot of prejudice about actors who go off to do TV or comedy – because I’ve done that, there are people in theatre who don’t think I can do much else,” Wokoma reckons, explaining that if it hadn’t been for her long friendship with Frances-White, she wouldn’t have landed her complex, intense current role in Never Have I Ever.
There’s something refreshing about Wokoma’s down-to-earth confidence that she’s got the potential to be much, much more than sitcom light relief.
“I’m not in the business of trying to convince people I’m great,” she says, but her stage and screen appearances this autumn have the potential to do that, all on their own.
‘Never Have I Ever’ is at Chichester Festival Theatre to 30 September; ‘Taskmaster’ begins at 9pm on 21 September on Channel Four