April 13th: Today’s Feature
- webbworks333
- Apr 13
- 4 min read
April
Part II - Daniel Kaluuya
At 18, Kaluuya was hired as a writer on the cult E4 drama Skins, and played the part of Posh Kenneth. He was “one of the youngest people ever to have written an hour of primetime television drama,” declared The Independent in 2008. Teenage Kaluuya’s response was typically modest: “When work ends, I’d rather just be seen as Daniel – normal.”
TV and film roles dripped through. In 2010 he gave a knockout performance in Roy Williams’s play Sucker Punch at the Royal Court theatre. “That changed everything,” he said in 2016. “Everything I’ve got now is probably from Sucker Punch.” Kaluuya said he lost two stone and was trained up by former pro Errol Christie to play the role of Leon, a black boxer growing up in the 80s. Kaluuya was magnetic, and won the Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard awards for Outstanding Newcomer that year.
But it was 2017’s Get Out that propelled him to major attention. The film was Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, a comedy-horror mash-up described as a cross between Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and The Stepford Wives. Peele had caught a 2011 episode of Black Mirror on Netflix – Fifteen Million Merits, in which Kaluuya spent much of the episode pedalling away on an exercise bike – and asked him to audition. Peele’s ambitions were to make a horror-thriller for black audiences that delivered a funny, knowing critique of systemic racism that would make viewers wince and gag.
The film was a critical and commercial sensation – made on a $4.5m budget, grossing $255m at the box office, and memed and referenced constantly in pop culture. Kaluuya played Chris, a photographer visiting his white girlfriend’s parents for the first time. “He is victim and avenger, a surrogate for the filmmaker and the audience,” wrote AO Scott in The New York Times, adding: “He can’t believe his eyes, and you can’t take yours off him.”
Kaluuya’s huge, tear-spilling eyes imprinted themselves on the audience. Americans couldn’t believe a Londoner had nailed the role – Samuel L Jackson caused a brief stir by questioning why a black Briton was hired – while Brits rushed to claim him as a homegrown star.
By the time he won best “newcomer” at the Baftas for Get Out in 2018, Kaluuya had been a professional actor for 10 years. “I am a product of UK arts funding,” he told the audience, before dedicating that award to his mum and old teachers. The experience was made even more jarring by the fact that he had also been nominated for best actor at the Academy Awards in the same season, lauded by the American press and immediately signed up to huge projects.
“There was clear racism in the industry in the UK,” he told a BFI interviewer last month, explaining that his recent career was a consequence of being forced to find work elsewhere and being offered opportunities he would never have in the UK. “I think that the centralisation of power within the UK industry is disintegrating … there are genuine, incredible talents and you can’t stop it. You can’t stop John Boyega. You can put up obstacles, but you can’t stop it.”
After Get Out, Kaluuya joined the set of the Marvel filmBlack Panther, the Marvel film which broke multiple records from its very first weekend of release. From there, he starred in Queen & Slim, the tale of a bad Tinder date between a couple who go on the run after shooting a cop. Steve McQueen hunted him down for a bone-chilling part in his film Widows. “I knew it was him,” said McQueen. “He has that gift you don’t see often, a presence even in his stillness. You feel what he is feeling, you see what he is seeing.”
Yet Kaluuya doesn’t see himself acting for much longer. “In terms of directing, I can see that’s the road . I think I’m going in that direction, but I’m just not sweating it… I don’t see myself acting for very long,” he said last month. “When I’m 36, I’ll have done it for 20 years. That’s a long time to be doing anything. You’ve got to challenge yourself, keep growing as a creative.”
He has kept writing – his script for The Kitchen, a film about 2040s London where “the city has become a billionaire’s playground and the working class live in lawless slums”, has been in development for several years. In 2019 he announced a surprise partnership with Mattel to produce a live action film about Barney the Dinosaur, the children’s TV show character, promising to subvert audience expectations for “a ubiquitous figure in many of our childhoods, [who] disappeared into the shadows, left misunderstood”.
He will be working on the film with producer and fellow Londoner Amandla Crichlow, daughter of the late activist Frank Crichlow, owner of the famous Mangrove restaurant. The couple are believed to be in a long-term relationship and partners in the production company 59%.
“I don’t know if I could have had this kind of career 10 years ago,” said Kaluuya earlier this year. “It’s the fruit of incredible work of people that came before.”