Paapa Essiedu may just be the finest acting talent of his generation. At 33, his career is already remarkable in its ambition and breadth.
A mainstay at the RSC in his early 20s, he made a surprise breakthrough when he was an understudy thrust into a leading role mid-performance in Sam Mendes’s King Lear at the National Theatre aged just 23 (helpfully, in front of The Guardian’s theatre critic), before playing the hottest Hamlet in years for the RSC, firmly establishing him as the most exciting new talent on stage.
Then came a series of impressive screen roles. Essiedu caught the eye in Russell T Davies’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, starred alongside his drama school pal Michaela Coel in her Bafta-winning I May Destroy You – all repressed pain and vulnerability. More recently, he played a smooth-talking ambitious politician caught up in a deepfake scandal in The Capture and the lead role in The Lazarus Project, joining a crew of time-travelling secret agents.
Now, fresh from another compelling turn in Netflix’s Black Mirror as a demon channelling Boney M’s disco king Bobby Farrell, he’s returning to his first love.
He meets The Big Issue writer Lucy Prebble’s play. It is, he says, “an exciting and scary day”. But if Essiedu is feeling nervous at returning to the scene of his surprise breakthrough after almost a decade, he’s a good enough actor to mask it.
