Wunmi Mosaku enters the room beaming. The heavily pregnant star is enjoying a brief moment of respite, sans red carpet gowns, opting instead for a Savage x Fenty hoodie, sporting her mini Afro and a bare face for the first time in weeks. However, she’s not complaining about her new fast-paced existence. “This is such a rare moment, and it's such a big moment for the film: 16 nominations!” she says, reflecting on the Oscars race over high tea at London’s The Chancery Rosewood. The Nigerian-born, Manchester-raised actor is in a close race for the Best Supporting Actress category at the 98th Academy Awards on 15th March, as a crucial part of the ensemble for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, the most-nominated film at the award ceremony since it began.
In the lead-up to the ceremony, our paths have crossed several times: at film screening Q&As, in the lobby of the BAFTAs (where she took home the Best Supporting Actress gong), on our cover photoshoot set. Wunmi appears to be doing everything, everywhere, all at once, on barely any sleep and in multiple time zones. She’s being honoured for her portrayal of Annie, the hoodoo priestess who is such a grounding force for the 2025 film. Its heady mix of horror, surrealism, and social commentary easily could’ve jumped the shark if not for the relatable stories of love and loss at its centre, and Wunmi has been described as the film’s “beating heart”.
At 39 years old, she has a vast CV. She’s one of the few actors to straddle multiple superhero franchises, with Marvel’s Loki and DC’s Batman v Superman. Her stint in gritty BBC drama Damilola, Our Loved Boy retold one of Britain’s most tragic cases involving the senseless killing of a young boy, and earned her her first BAFTA. Netflix’s refugee thriller His House and Jordan Peele’s Lovecraft Country showed early signs of her penchant for horror as a metaphor for racial oppression. She also appeared in long-running, beloved British TV hits like Luther and Black Mirror.
But Sinners, which grossed $368 million worldwide, is undoubtedly her watershed. “This is the moment that I have worked 20 years towards,” she says. No matter what happens at the Oscars, Wunmi Mosaku is quickly becoming the people’s champion.‘
In an industry with few working-class stars, Wunmi’s journey is unique. Moving to England from Nigeria at the age of one, she was raised on a council estate in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, South Manchester, in a “house full of girls”. The youngest of three daughters, hers was a household of ambition led by two academics. Despite possessing PhDs – her mother in chemistry and her father in architecture – the pair initially struggled to get work after immigrating. School was also a little rocky at times. As a teenager, she was diagnosed with dyslexia. When she struggled with her grades, teachers suggested her parents stop speaking to her in their mother tongue of Yoruba. Though the Nigerian language has made its way into the UK charts in recent years via Afrobeats, when Wunmi was young, it was something to be concealed. “When we grew up in school, it was not cool to be Nigerian – or African,” she says. “I found out [a classmate] was African, like, 15 years after school!”
Her mother at one point began teaching maths and science to kids at Ishango, an after-school club in the city aimed at improving STEM attainment for African and Caribbean students. Wunmi attended this rigorous training, and was initially expected to pursue a degree in economics, but early on she began forging her own path as she developed a love for the arts. She sang in Manchester Girls’ Choir to feed her love of opera (take that, Timothée Chalamet), adding her own “rebel” flair to performances despite her instructors’ pleas to fall in line with the other singers. Wunmi also developed a curious daily ritual of coming home every day after primary school, drinking cartons of long-life milk, and watching Annie. “When I decided to be an actor, I Googled every member of the cast of Annie. Albert Finney is from Salford, Manchester, and he went to RADA – that’s how I heard about drama school,” she says. “Annie changed my life.”
Her time at RADA wasn’t entirely plain sailing either. She told The Times she was the only Black girl in her class, felt she struggled to be chosen as the leading lady, was ridiculed for her Mancunian accent, and spent most of her student loan travelling home to be with family. But her passion for the craft never wavered. Her jump from one Annie to another was powered by her family’s collective faith in her ability. During her BAFTAs acceptance speech last month, Wunmi said: “Mum, thank you for all you have sacrificed… you gave me the freedom to make my own choices and dare to dream.”
As her mother gave her the confidence to trust her intuition, Wunmi has mostly chosen roles based on the energy of the cast and crew, her gut, or a sense of destiny. “I felt like I got trapped in the police officer world, and I remember thinking, ‘God, I can't play another police officer for a little while’. The next offer that came in was for a police officer on a TV show – a big role in an American series, paying more money than I could imagine. But I wanted a chance to explore something else. It felt like a test,” she says.
It paid off. Shortly after turning down the big job, her career took on a whole new direction. “I said, ‘You know what I really want? I want a 10-part HBO series’, and then I auditioned for Lovecraft, and I got it,” she says. “It didn’t make me a millionaire, but I will pay my team back eventually. My husband and I still talk about that job still to this day.” All her years playing cops were not in vain, though. Ryan Coogler eventually saw a trailer of her work in We Own This City and decided to write his leading lady in Sinners based on her; she reminded him of the women who had supported and loved him throughout his life.
Faith, fate, and spirituality are central to Sinners. Centring on twin brothers on the run from Chicago, with the hopes of opening a juke joint in their hometown in Mississippi, the story soon reveals a greater evil, unfolding into a gothic, slow-burning, claustrophobic vampire tale. It is bookended by Christian symbolism. The twins' cousin, Preacher Boy – the resident performer at their music venue – is lambasted by his father, who won’t let him play his little guitar for fear it is a gateway to his son’s damnation. Yet in the final act, the vampires are undeterred by Preacher Boy’s rendition of “Our Father”. These scenes triggered a mild satanic panic online, with some Christians branding the film “demonic”. The religious characters who leave the horror with their dignity intact are the Native American vampire hunter – who blends Christian and indigenous spiritual practices earlier in the film – and, of course, Wunmi’s portrayal of Annie, and her traditional African American folk spiritual system of Hoodoo, with links to Nigerian Ifa wisdom.
Sinners is a reevaluation of everything we’re told is scary or evil. Even though Wunmi still holds on to her belief in God, she says she had to “decolonise” her ideas around religion in order to understand Annie. “Even words like ‘witch doctor’ can only have come from the coloniser, because it's in English,” she tells me. Earlier that month, speaking to a crowd at the Curzon Hoxton cinema, Wunmi described Annie as the “full embodiment of what this film is”, which, to her, is about connection to your community. She also revealed that the studio almost cut the chain gang scene, where Delta Slim (portrayed by Delroy Lindo) recalls his friend being lynched. Their edits felt like: “Let's get to the vampires” – but the real horror lies in knowing what was lost.
Wunmi is undergoing her own rediscovery as the film encouraged her to reconnect with her roots. It’s fitting that she plays such a mystical character, because throughout any conversation with Wunmi, she regularly refers to the divine. “My name, Oluwunmi, is like, 'God is attracting me', or ‘I desire God’” And her last name? “Mosaku means ‘I run from death’. I see it as not like you're scared of death, but that it doesn't come easily to you. My paternal grandma lived until she was 119.”
In Ifa, connecting with the spirit of your ancestors who came before you is key to reaching your destiny. This is something that really resonated with Wunmi as an immigrant who had lost her language (though she’s recently begun relearning Yoruba) and her connection to her homeland. In her BAFTA acceptance speech, she noted that the character helped her find her “ancestral power”.
“Black people might say I'm my ancestors' wildest dreams. I remember when I was in labour just calling on my grandma. I was like, let me call on all the women who did this before me. You’re remembering who you're from, and that the power that lived in them lives in me.”
Perhaps the film’s most talked-about scene is the juke joint performance, which sees Preacher Boy’s gift conjure musical past and presence to dance together in the Jim Crow-era bar – from hip-hop breakdancers and funk guitarists to African drummers. Wunmi describes the hallucinatory, fever-dream sequence as “magical” in the way it shows how the diaspora is connected via our shared history and culture. As a third-culture kid, she’s always felt unmoored, but Sinners made her reevaluate. “This film just really made me stop focusing on what I had lost, and actually see what we have retained,” she adds.
Sinners’ vampires symbolise those who crave the vitality and art of Black culture while exploiting or abusing its creators. It is stranger than fiction, then, to see how the BBC – which benefits from the attendance of the cast to the BAFTA awards – failed to protect the Black people in the room by failing to censor a racial sluto censor a racial slur when the ceremony aired. Tourette’s campaigner, John Davidson, involuntarily shouted the N-word while fellow Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage presenting one of the categories. The BBC has since apologised for not editing out the slur.
“Obviously, the BAFTA win, there's been a shadow. It's been very difficult since the BBC decided to air what it aired,” says Wunmi. However, the cast’s strong relationship has been a salve. “We've just held each other. I was [up for] the next award, so I came off the stage and I saw them, and I hugged them.”
Wunmi has been clear that her upset is directed at the BBC rather than Davidson, who has since reached out to Jordan and Lindo to apologise, while the BBC state that it “was aired in error” and they “would never have knowingly allowed this to be broadcast”.
“Everyone who was impacted deserved the grace to have it taken out – the care to have it taken out,” Wunmi says. “We found out later that night that it was online. We'd been told that it was a family-friendly show at 7pm and that there was a two-hour delay. So how could it possibly have been left in?”
In typical Wunmi Mosaku style, the actor refocuses her attention on the positives. She says being at the NAACP awards a few days later was “healing” and a “really beautiful way to feel the love again, and remember the community that we're celebrating – and who has been celebrating us”. It’s also been followed by joyous wins at the Actor Awards (formerly known as the SAG Awards), where Sinners won ‘Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture’, and Michael B. Jordan was crowned ‘Best Actor’, much to Wunmi’s joy. “Oh, I forgot I was pregnant, and jumped and jumped and jumped! That gave myself a few issues,” she laughs.
The cast have a very close relationship. Jack O’Connell is “always checking in” on Wunmi’s daughter, who was born in 2024 and whose name she keeps out of the public domain. Ryan Coogler sends the cast flowers for their birthdays. “We’re all on the phone a lot. Me and Delroy are on the phone a lot. Me and Michael are on the phone a lot. We're just constantly in communication, just like regular mates.”
She also has a lot of admiration for her fellow Best Supporting Actress nominees. “I don't want to say my name,” Wunmi says. “I don't want to jinx anyone or myself. But I've loved getting to know Teyana Taylor. I met Elle Fanning the other day, which was really lovely. I think they're all lovely people. Amy Madigan is probably going to win,” she laughs.
If you’ve ever wondered what the lead-up to the Oscars feels like, Wunmi sums it up in one word: “overstimulating”. “I didn't realise all this stuff in between – a 14-day week in London, an 11-day week in New York,” she says. Sometimes she makes the long-haul journey just to stay in one or the other for 24 hours. “I’m peopled out. There are so many sounds. I just need to be on my own and quiet,” she says, exasperated. “I'm saving everything for 16th March, when I go on mat leave. I’ve not even watched Heated Rivalry yet!”
Wondering if she’s taken any notes from Annie, I ask how she approaches wellness amid the chaos while she’s blooming. “I have to keep up with the gym because my bones are trying to go left, right and back – they're trying to move quickly – so I have to do my strength training in order to keep my body literally together.”
Juggling new motherhood with the biggest moments of her career is nothing new to Wunmi. She tells me she was breastfeeding during the filming of Sinners, and now, on weekends between red carpets, she takes her daughter – whom she’s raising with her husband, talent manager Tash Moseley, in the US – to dance classes or to see her best friends. “It gives me a different drive. I was driven before I had my daughter, but it gives me a new clarity. Now it's not just a job – it's time away from her. I'm very cautious about who I choose to spend my time with.”
“I’m not very calm,” she adds. “I have ADHD and I have really struggled. I’ve got into nesting mode and I’ve become fixated on [house renovations]: getting lighting in the ceiling because I feel like Americans love lamps and I can’t see anything. I also became focused on moving a door in the past four days – thank God that was cancelled. Why was I trying to do that? It’s not the right time,” she exclaims. Her neurodivergence makes her quite “homely”, as her focus outside the chaos of the entertainment industry is on trying to keep her family in order.
“I now consider my ADHD in everything, so home life takes priority over socialising or texting on a group thread – I'm not trying to read all these messages.”
Away from the spotlight, she also strips right back aesthetically. “I’m terrible at makeup. I don't wear makeup on the day-to-day because I can't be bothered to take it off at the end of the day. I don't do my hair.” Wunmi says it likely has something to do with the way she was raised. “My mum only really started wearing makeup when we did, she was very particular about me having to turn 16 to wear makeup. I remember going to Boots to mark the occasion. She was the same with alcohol. She didn't drink anything and then when I turned 18, she had a wine.”
One notable thing about Wunmi’s M.O. for beauty is how she exhibits the versatility and creativity of natural hair, believing that straight hair “doesn’t suit her outfits”. Wunmi has opted instead for self-acceptance, embracing t he way she looks when she wakes up in the morning. “When I was a kid, I did affirmations, telling [parts of] myself from the age of 12, ‘I love you hair, I love you skin, I love you stretch marks’. I very much believe it’s love yourself or hurt yourself.”
As she gears up for her maternity leave and what could be a historic awards-season night, Wunmi is understandably thinking about legacy and what she wants to leave behind. On a personal level, she wants to be remembered as “a woman of integrity and kindness”. But her body of work has shown the beauty and power of ordinary women. “My intention would be to be part of projects that make people look at humanity differently,” she says. “That's what encourages me.” On that front, it’s hard to argue that she’s not already cemented that legacy.
Photographer: Ekua King @ekuaking
Stylist: Georgia Medley @georgmedley
Hair Stylist: Dionne Smith @dionnesmithhair
Makeup Artist: Joy Adenuga @joyadenuga
Nails: Tinu Bello @tinubellomanicurist
Set Design: Joshua Stovell @joshstovell
Set Assistant: Pablo Lopez Bueno
Production: RAW Production @rawproduction_uk
Videographer: Nathaniel Rodriguez @filmedbynathaniel
Digi Tech: Louise Oates @louiseoates
Photographer’s Assistant: Stephen Elwyn @stephen_elwyn
Stylist’s Assistant: Jack O’Neill @jxneill
Stylist’s Assistant: Alice Dench @alicerose_d
Seamstress: Ruth Moriarty
