For the best part of two years, Daniel Kaluuya has lived and worked in the US, where his elevation to fame – sudden, unexpected, by turns gratifying and alarming – has made him look differently on his native UK. “I think there’s more room in the US to create something and see what happens,” the 28-year-old says, while unwinding after a photoshoot in New York, where he is taking a break from LA awards shows. (A week after our meeting, Kaluuya is nominated for an Oscar for Get Out; the film was also nominated at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild awards.) “While in England, I feel, there’s The Way and if you don’t fit in with The Way, then you don’t fit in. A lot of people think their way is The Way. I think my way is a way. And you’re imposing your way on to my way, and I’m like: no way.”

A year after the release of Get Out, the hit horror-comedy-satire by Jordan Peele, in which Kaluuya plays Chris, a good-natured photographer who finds himself at the mercy of a plot by his white girlfriend and her family to body-snatch African Americans, he is still uncomfortable with the apparatus of fame. He moves stiffly around the studio, crossing the room with what seems like the last vestiges of youthful self-consciousness. As a child, he dreamed of becoming a professional footballer; acting was just a channel for what one teacher euphemistically called his “busyness”, so there is some irony in two of his best performances, in Black Mirror and Get Out, being notable for their stillness. The most famous scene in Peele’s film sees Kaluuya weeping, wide-eyed, as the direness of his situation becomes clear. But it is a much subtler scene, at the beginning of the film, that really showcases his talents, as he cycles between bafflement and eagerness to please while trying to make small talk with his girlfriend’s parents.

Kaluuya has been nominated for a best actor Oscar for his performance in Get Out. Photograph: AP

“There was a shift in mood after that scene,” says Kaluuya, who first saw the movie with a general audience in Atlanta. “It’s because they see that he’s trying to be a good boyfriend, and I think everyone can identify with that. He’s awkward, he doesn’t know what to say: ‘This is really weird, but I want to be perceived as good, and you’re not giving me the room to do that at the moment, but maybe I should stay silent? Maybe not? Just keep it safe?’ That’s what I was trying to communicate. And what’s incredible about Jordan’s writing is that he’s tapped into a universal truth there, and a universal black truth as well, using an African American voice and perspective. And I get Indian guys coming up to me going, ‘Yeah, I’ve been there. How do you meet the parents?’”

The film’s “universal black truth” is one that, when Kaluuya first read the script, struck him as so “unsayable” that he asked his agent if Peele could actually make the film. It also triggered coverage, after the release, in which many of the things Peele was satirising were brought to bear: the imposition on black public figures of a single, struggle-to-redemption narrative; the assumption that a prominent figure speaks for all members of their race; and the insistence, most aggravating to Kaluuya, on entwining his own biography with that of his character in Get Out, as “proof” that he is black enough to play him. “It was disorienting,” says Kaluuya, whose instincts, always, are to dismiss the hype. Get Out, however, was undeniably a Thing, and “I was in the middle of this thing that was a Thing. And I’m here now. I made it.” He laughs. “I made it out.”

In fact, for the first few weeks after the release, Kaluuya was insulated from the film’s massive and surprise success (on a budget of $4.5m, it has raked in, to date, almost $255m), cloistered on set in Atlanta. He was filming Black Panther, the latest superhero movie from Marvel Studios. It wasn’t until Kaluuya went back to England and people started yelling to him at a phone shop that he realised Get Out was taking off; and it wasn’t until a Screen Actors Guild question-and-answer session earlier this year that it really sank in. “I was like, it’s a packed cinema and they all want to talk to me. Every time I came back to America, it seemed to be getting bigger - and that never happens. I usually do stuff, and two weeks later it disappears.”

With Michael B Jordan in Black Panther. Photograph: Matt Kennedy/© Marvel Studios 2018

Kaluuya says this with equanimity: he never had expectations, not from lack of personal ambition, but from a kind of wry understanding of what was expected of him. He grew up with his mother and sister on a council estate in Camden, north London, where “being from the manor, people don’t tell you what you can do. The whole of flipping society tells you what you can’t do, and people don’t even realise that – because they’re not of that demographic, so they’re not attuned to stuff. But if you’re attuned to them, you hear these things.”

Look at what’s being transmitted from England to America: Downton Abbey, The Crown, Notting Hill. Not Top Boy or Stormzy

For Kaluuya, who went to the Anna Scher theatre as a child and started getting acting work while at school, the limitations were something he was able to spin to himself as a kind of psychological advantage. If he’d had the money, he’d have liked to go to full-time drama school, but “while no formal education can give you an insecurity, it gives me a sense of, well, let’s see what happens. It’s the arts. When people impose rules on the arts, I think you’re a flipping weirdo. There are no fucking rules.”

There are, however, entrenched cultural expectations – “cultural baggage that has nothing to do with you as an individual” – and coming to America as a black British actor brought Kaluuya directly into conflict with them. In the US, Kaluuya is by default considered “posh”, or at the very least advantaged by nature of his Britishness. In the wake of Get Out’s release, Samuel L Jackson questioned the appropriateness of casting a British actor in a role that might profitably have gone to an African American. “What would a brother from America have made of that role?” Jackson asked, forcing Kaluuya into the unhappy position of having to defend himself by showcasing all the ways in which Britain is as racist as the US.

“It’s just strange,” he says now of the way in which this narrative about his relative privilege played out. “It’s just not factual. But you’ve got to look at what’s being transmitted from England to America: it’s Downton Abbey, it’s The Crown and Notting Hill – the real Notting Hill doesn’t look like the movie Notting Hill. They’re not showing things like Top Boy, or Big Shaq, or Stormzy, which show that London is actually similar to New York.

Blazer and sweater, both Ermenegildo Zegna. Stylist: Jason Rembert at the Wall Group. Stylist’s assistants: Kirsten McGovern and Daniel Lee. Grooming: Seto McCoy. Photograph: Andreas Laszlo Konrath/The Guardian

“The images are not contemporary, but that’s Brand Britain. I’ve made peace with it. And look at the kind of plays that go to the West End, and who writes those plays – are they reflective of London? I don’t think so.” He looks momentarily weary. It is exhausting not only to be on the receiving end of these expectations, but also to have constantly to explain them.

What helped after Get Out was that, on the set of Black Panther, Kaluuya was surrounded by an almost entirely black cast and crew, including director Ryan Coogler and actors who’d gone through some semblance of what he was going through. “So Lupita Nyong’o understood, because she had a bit of that after 12 Years A Slave. But then I think that was different, because a Steve McQueen movie would always be in that awards conversation. I just did a film and we didn’t think it would be in this conversation. But Mike [Michael B Jordan] said some cool stuff, things to watch out for. A lot of times, they were looking out for me. ‘Are you good? Are you all right?’ I needed that experience. It was very important for me.”

My mum got me into the Anna Scher theatre so I was doing stuff after school, or on weekends, and wasn’t doing silliness

Above all, Kaluuya says, he looked to the positive example of the movie’s director. “It was very important for me to see Ryan Coogler be the director – a guy from Oakland. He sounds very west coast to me, like YG, like rappers. Sometimes in England, they make it feel like you can’t talk the way you talk. And even the term ‘slang’: it’s not slang, it’s a dialect. You wouldn’t tell someone from Edinburgh to change how they speak, or someone from Liverpool. But, yeah, if you’re working class from London, I have to what, accommodate you? Don’t tell Liam Gallagher that, so why are you telling [British rapper] Giggs that? Or Stormzy?” Coogler’s direction of a $200m movie fixed something in the actor’s mind. “It was important for me to see a man helming the flipping massive ship like that, being himself.”

***

Kaluuya thinks it was a plumber who told his mother about the Anna Scher theatre. He was nine years old and one of his teachers at primary school had advised her to find an outlet for his energy. “He’s busy,” the teacher said. “He’s a busy kid.”

“Hyperactive. Distracted,” he says now, smiling. “I remember one time in my report it said, ‘Daniel is a distraction to others and himself.’ And I had this image of me” – he does a pantomime of interrupting and bothering himself – “and I’d hate it in class when they’d say, ‘Daniel, shut up!’ Am I talking to myself? Why are you telling me to shut up? There’s a conver-fucking-sation! It didn’t make sense to me. So because I said, ‘No’, I’d get kicked out. But I liked making people laugh. I liked performing, and I may even have voiced that.”

If so, he didn’t voice it very loudly. Acting wasn’t on his radar or the radar of anyone he knew; when his name finally rose to the top of the Anna Scher waiting list, Kaluuya was quiet about attending. “It was like living a double life. But my mum got me into it, so I didn’t hang out in the road – so I was doing stuff after school, or on the weekends, and wasn’t doing silliness. Because it’s easy to slip into silly stuff. The other day she admitted this to another mum: ‘Oh yeah, I got him into it so he didn’t hang out on the street.’”

Kaluuya’s performance in Fifteen Million Merits, an early Black Mirror episode in 2011, led to Jordan Peele casting him in Get Out. Photograph: Channel 4

In the five years Kaluuya had spent on the waiting list, he had won a kids’ playwriting competition that saw his work performed at the Hampstead Theatre, and had also forgotten about acting in favour of football. Now he found himself in an alien environment. “You weren’t given lines, or a script at Anna Scher. You had to make it up. It was improvisation and it let out a lot of steam.”

That sounds terrifying.

“I was terrified, at the beginning. But then it became a game, because everyone went up. It’s not like you were being judged. I think when even the teachers went up, a shift happened in me and I understood what acting was. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s quite cool – let me try to make it work.’ You may as well try to get everyone’s attention, and get them to stop playing Snake on their phone.”

His mother, while proud, is still somewhat sceptical of the career that grew out of these experiences. “She liked it,” he says mildly, of her response to Get Out. “I think she liked it. She went to the premiere and I said, ‘Mum, how was my American accent?’ And she said, ‘Nearly there.’” He bursts out laughing. “That’s honest. That is love and care.”

His mother finds acting too erratic a profession. “She calls me every time and says, ‘Have you got a job yet?’ And I haven’t. I can’t say to her, ‘You gotta wait – the nos mean something.’ I tell her I’m writing a script. She says, ‘Just type full stop.’”

After the hype around Get Out, Kaluuya is more grateful than ever for his mother’s unhistrionic attitude. He calls this right-sizing: “It’s my favourite word at the moment: right-size. Because some people amplify things to make them bigger than they are. So [it helps] when people say, ‘OK, cool, it’s an achievement – but you’re not Jesus. It’s a job.’” He recalls something the actor Nigel Lindsay once said to him: “You know you’re going crazy when you’re on set and think the umbrella is for you and not your costume.”

In Sucker Punch at London’s Royal Court in 2010. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

Kaluuya got good GCSE grades and, mainly to please his mother, stayed on at school to do A-levels. By the second year, he had started appearing in and writing for Skins, the Channel 4 youth drama, and school had started to feel increasingly irrelevant. Still, he finished his A-levels, “because when I start things I like to finish them”. There was no conscious decision to commit himself to acting. Rather, Kaluuya says, he followed his interests. “It’s just stuff that makes you feel good. That’s all I think you should do, as a kid: loads of stuff you enjoy.”

I haven’t got time for X-Factor sob stories. Why hasn't positive stuff I’ve been doing as a young black person spread?

Over the next few years, he appeared in several plays, including Oxford Street at the Royal Court, and as one of the two leads in Sucker Punch, the Roy Williams play about young boxers that caught the eye of critics and casting agents. He also had bit parts in all the usual British drama – Lewis, Doctor Who – and then, in 2011, he starred as Bing in Fifteen Million Merits, an early episode of Black Mirror that was behind Peele’s decision to cast him in Get Out. He plays a contender in a nightmare version of a TV talent contest, in which, in order to qualify, hopefuls are made to rack up miles on exercise bikes while digital media is shoved down their throats. Kaluuya’s character rebels with an almost Shakespearean grandeur, weeping and aflame. It was a knockout performance, but it seemed not to lead to anything. It was a full five years before the offer came in to be in a stand-up comedian’s first, low-budget movie, and he grabbed it.

You can learn a lot about people from how they react to a movie such as Get Out, Kaluuya says. Can he give me an example? He thinks for a moment. “I remember, I went to a party and this white woman came up to me and said, ‘I think racism shouldn’t be handled in that way.’ She was saying the film belittled racism because it had comedic moments. And I was like, ‘OK.’ I try not to challenge people, because I think this film reveals who they are. And I find it fascinating. And I’ll think, ‘If a black person is communicating something about his experience, he should be able to do it, and you policing it is very interesting.’”



With David Haig and Luke Norris in Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange at London’s Young Vic in 2016. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian

He had a similar experience of flushing out biases in the audience while performing in Joe Penhall’s play Blue/Orange, when it was revived at the Young Vic in 2016. To his surprise, elements of the script that weren’t intended to be funny invariably triggered laughter. “I think there was a scene at the end of it when my character was having a breakdown. Because I grew up in Camden, I’ve been exposed to a lot of addicts from a young age, people who are mentally unstable – and they’re really funny. Sometimes they’re funny, and sometimes their thought process is just very unique. So they arrive at things and are quirky in how they choose to communicate. So I said some stuff and people were laughing – because people laugh at people who are mentally unstable. It was revelatory for me, because I wasn’t playing it for laughs, not this bit.” He shrugs. “It’s human. It just is.”



It’s a philosophical attitude that has armoured Kaluuya. One antidote to the feeling of being sucked into the publicity grid is writing your own scripts, which is what he is currently doing, working on a feature film and a TV series, both “UK stories, because that’s me, born and bred”.

Still, Kaluuya hasn’t escaped entirely unscathed. One of the more difficult aspects of exposure has been watching incidents from his past get pulled out and given a significance over which he has almost no control. One of these is the court action he took against the Metropolitan police four years ago, after he was pulled off a bus and pinned to the ground by officers who, he maintained in the lawsuit, had singled him out because of racial stereotyping.

There is, he says, something grotesque about the way in which this episode has been used to “legitimise” his right to be in Get Out – he has suffered racial trauma and is therefore qualified to play it. “It’s corny,” he says. “I find all that corny: ‘Oh, this is my struggle.’ I haven’t got time. I’m not here for the X-Factor sob stories.”

Kaluuya wrote for and starred in the Channel 4 youth drama Skins. Photograph: ZWA/WENN

More than anything, what he objects to is the way in which the experience gets flattened into a broad narrative about race that all but erases him as an individual. “Positive stuff that I’ve been doing in my life, as a young black person – why hasn’t that spread?”

Well, partly because the police story is drama.

“But it’s a certain narrative, a certain way in which people see black people. I don’t like race debates. I find them boring. What’s to debate? Do you think racism’s good? What are we debating? Let’s just go and do our shit. It doesn’t mean I shy away from it, but I’m not ‘interested in race’. It’s just something I have to have a deep understanding and knowledge of, because of my experience, and because I have to navigate the western world. It’s something I have to know about first to survive, and then to thrive.”

As he says this, he knocks on the table to underline each word. “Race is not something I’m interested in like I’m interested in music. I’m not reading so many essays [about race] for fun; I’m reading them because I need to know how to articulate myself in certain situations, and I feel very alone in certain spaces. And I feel weird, and I have to have a word map, and the armour. I know about race for armour. I don’t know about race to make myself feel good.”

He is talking, in part, about being on film and TV sets where he is the only person of colour in the room, and where the set “hasn’t been my vibe”. “That’s OK,” he says. “It’s not a bad thing.” But it does require some negotiation on his part, given the potential experience gap between white people and people of colour, and the biases and assumptions that attend them.

Jacket by No 21. Shirt by Diesel Black Gold. Styling: Jason Rembert at the Wall Group. Stylist’s assistants: Kirsten McGovern and Daniel Lee. Grooming: Seto McCoy. Photograph: Andreas Laszlo Konrath/The Guardian

One of these is the tendency on the publicity trail to treat successful black actors as representatives of their race, something that annoys him immensely. “I’m not a spokesperson; I’m an individual,” he says. “Who’s the spokesperson for white people? There isn’t one. No one’s expected to speak up for all white people. I’m just living my life. I’m a black man, I’m proud of it, but I’m just living my life. I don’t see myself as a victim. You may victimise me, but you will not make me feel like a victim. And if you think you can, then what sort of person are you?”

After the interview, Kaluuya smiles and wonders aloud if he was too strident; if the impression given by this speech might itself be fed into the machine. His best response, he believes, is to carry on doing good work. He has recently filmed Widows, directed by Steve McQueen and co-starring Liam Neeson and Viola Davis, based on Lynda La Plante’s 1980s novel about four women whose husbands are killed in a failed heist and come together to finish off the job.

Kaluuya tells the story of going on holiday to Florida as a kid with his mother. As they walked down the street, a homeless woman, hearing their accents, started shouting after them. “And she was like, ‘They have black people in England? I thought it was just Prince Charles and shit.’ And, like, that’s what they think; I mean, Idris Elba has helped. Chiwetel Ejiofor has helped. But, like, cool, we exist. Why do we need approval to exist?”

He laughs. “If you’re baffled by me, then you’re baffled. I’m not baffled by me. I’ve been with me for a while. So I’m just going to keep going.”

• Black Panther is released on 12 February in the UK and on 16 February in the US.

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