Nigerian actor Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was ‘farmed out’ to foster parents in 1970s Essex to improve his prospects. It did not go well, as he shows in his directing debut, Farming

There are some stories that, though they wait half a lifetime, must get told. Seven years ago, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje gave an interview to this paper in which he talked about his autobiographical film, Farming, which was then about to go into production after a dramatised reading of the script had headlined a Sundance festival promotion in London. At the time the actor was enjoying a measure of Hollywood fame for his role in the cult TV series Lost. Farming, which he had then already been writing and developing for nearly a decade, explored a real-life mystery: it was the incredible story of how he, a young Nigerian boy raised by white foster parents in 1970s Tilbury, Essex, had forged an identity for himself in a violently racist local skinhead gang, and lived to tell the tale.

The film, which eventually premiered at the Toronto festival last year, goes on wider release this month. It both dramatises a brutal and moving coming-of-age and shines a light on a little-known chapter in the story of race relations in Britain: the practice that led to thousands of Nigerian children like Akinnuoye-Agbaje being ‘farmed out’ to British families in that period. When I met its creator last week in London, I suggested that having the film out in the world must produce many emotions in him, but I imagined that, given its long gestation, one of the primary ones is relief.

Akinnuoye-Agbaje, back in London from his long-term home in Los Angeles, is a big-shouldered, charismatic presence, with an easy eloquence on many subjects, including his past. He agrees that “the film is an exhalation, and a huge one”. He says: “The fact is, I literally first started writing the screenplay all those years ago because I could not sleep at night.”

In directing the film he has had to go through all the nightmarish boyhood trauma and violence it details for a second time. He says: “A production designer rebuilt the house which for many years was the breeding ground for my own self-hatred. At the helm of a film you don’t have the luxury of too much emotion, but afterwards, watching it, certainly.”

The film has provoked “an outpouring” not only from his immediate family but from hundreds of other Nigerian British children who experienced something similar. Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s parents were among a generation of Nigerians to come to the colonial “mother country” to get a university education they could take home and use to build democracy in their newly independent nation, then beset by civil war.

His father came to study law, his mother accountancy. When he was a few months old, they placed a discreet advert in a local paper to find a family that could care for him while they studied and worked to pay for their degrees. The film begins with them handing over their child – and the first monthly payment for his care – to the family that responded to that advert in a dockside row of terrace houses in the outer reaches of east London. The scene raises many questions, most insistent of which is: what could they have been thinking?

A policeman called me over, half smiled and then spat in my face. I just remember that hot saliva on my face

The film-maker has obviously given that question a great deal of thought. He says: “My understanding is that it derived from an age-old habit: in Nigeria – and elsewhere in Africa – it was common for parents to send their children from the village to a town, to an extended family member or even a stranger, because it was thought that child would have more opportunities.

“The problems began with people like my parents because it was a foreign country. I think it was seen as a status thing – and there was an element of ‘white being seen as right’. Mostly they wanted us to get an education and learn to speak good English.”

Because of the informal, under-the-radar nature of the practice, there are no figures for how many children were “farmed”, but Akinnuoye-Agbaje believes that well over half of all Nigerian British children would have experienced at least a few years away from their birth families in this way (he mentions the Olympic medallist Kriss Akabusi as somebody who has also spoken about it). The practice only really came to an end, he suggests, after stricter checks were put in place following the abuse and murder of Victoria Climbié in 2000. In the intervening years, however, few of the foster arrangements could have been as extreme as the environment in which the film-maker found himself.

He was one of at least 10 Nigerian children taken in by his foster parents and mostly raised by his new mother, Ingrid (played in the film with abrasive spirit by Kate Beckinsale) while her husband was away working as a lorry driver. All those children fell to earth in Tilbury, a fertile recruiting ground for nascent far-right groups in the years after Enoch Powell made his “rivers of blood” speech. Akinnuoye-Agbaje and his new “siblings” – the family also eventually took in his two younger sisters – were initially the only black faces in their area.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kate Beckinsale as Ingrid, the foster mother. Photograph: Angus Young

One of his first memories was starting school, he recalls. “The sun was shining and the first autumn leaves were beneath my shoes and I was walking with all the other kids to St Mary’s primary. A police car was on the side of the road and the policeman called me over. He half-smiled at me. And then he spat in my face and drove off. I looked around and the sun was still shining, children were walking by and I just remember that hot saliva on my face. I had to carry on going to school.”

Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s foster parents told their children they were the just the same as everybody else, but at the same time they shared some of the racist attitudes around them. “What is incredible about this story,” he says, “is that it isn’t black and white. My parents would use racist slurs to us, but you would hear the same things on TV comedies; it was the wallpaper of that time. That is not to excuse them. But one of the things I hope the film shows is that their initial intent to take on children was pure – my mother could not have children of her own – but over time there was a realisation that it was also a racket, and money could be made out of it.”

As he grew older his mother encouraged him to shoplift for her, and just walking down the street was a trial: “You had dogs set on you, bricks thrown at you.”

His father forced him back out on the streets to stand up to the bullies on his own: “There was no way of getting love. If all you have experienced is humiliation and rejection, and your foster father forces you to fight back or get a beating from him, you look for any kind of lifeline. There were only two options: fight, or become a victim. I tried the victim option for a long time.”

Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s sense of dislocation was not helped when his birth parents, of whom he was hardly aware, abruptly arrived to take him with them back to Nigeria when he was eight or nine years old. From the streets of Tilbury he was suddenly transported to a traditional village. He was struck mute by the change. The solution his parents arrived at was to send him back to the same family in Essex where he now suffered an even greater identity crisis. In desperation he tried to scrub away at his skin to make it whiter. When that did not work, Akinnuoye-Agbaje adopted the only strategy for survival that seemed available to him. He made himself tougher and more fearless than his tormentors. At 16, expelled from school, he joined forces with them, becoming part of the skinhead gang that had once stripped and beaten him in the street.

At first, he says he was treated as a weapon to be unleashed in turf battles with other gangs, or occasionally in racial assaults on black sailors in the docks. “It was not cosy at any moment. It was always a frenetic kind of tension, because an attack could have come from within or without at any time.”

Did he shift the attitudes of the gang at all?

“There was some respect, because I had bottle. I could take a beating and give one back,” he says. “But I was never anything like an equal. They were inquisitive about my hair, about my smell, about my skin. And there was a camaraderie in that we were all outsiders. Their fathers were drunks or unemployed. But every time I felt like I might belong I would abruptly be made aware that I was different. You would have an experience that would bond you, a fight, or even a joke, but then you were quickly made aware you were ‘the wog’, ‘the coon’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In the second season of Lost, with Kiersten Havelock. Photograph: AF Archive/Alamy

When he first talked about these experiences in that previous Observer interview, some commentators on the story suggested that Akinnuoye-Agbaje misrepresented skinhead culture, that it was more racially nuanced than he argued and that his story was exaggerated. He laughs when I mention that criticism.

“Had those people grown up in Tilbury? London was a so-called multicultural melting pot by the early 1980s. But on the outskirts, it was a very different story. Anybody who has those opinions I invite them to go back to Tilbury and be the only black kid in that school. It’s not that I want to say all skinhead culture was like that, but this particular group certainly was.”

Some of the most extreme scenes in the film mix incidents that Akinnuoye-Agbaje heard about as well as experienced first hand. “The fights I was involved in were not fatal ones. But let’s be clear,” he claims, “several of the guys I was with six months later were dead, and they were dead because of hammers to the head or whatever. It was a very real world that I conveyed.”

It was his foster mother who rescued him in the first instance. Unsure how to protect him from the gang, she contacted his birth family – and after one violent confrontation with his father (by now a successful lawyer in Nigeria) he was packed off to boarding school in Surrey. He first rejected that opportunity. Then, with the encouragement of a girlfriend and a teacher, eventually embraced education. He went on to study law at King’s College London.

“People often ask me: how do you go from being a skinhead to having a bachelor’s and a master’s degree?” he says. He tells them: “Intelligence is the ability to make the most of your circumstances, whether you are on the street or in a university. The big help was a teacher who helped to translate the language of the law into a vernacular I understood. Once I got that, I was off to the races.” He laughs. “Obviously I had an intimate knowledge of breaking the law. My master’s was in criminal justice; I did a thesis on the prison system.”

It was at college that he was first spotted to do some modelling and a friend suggested he go to Los Angeles to try to launch an acting career. He went to an audition for a 1995 movie called Congo, and got the part; roles in movies including The Bourne Identity and Thor and (as Malko) in the fifth season of Game of Thrones followed, along with Lost. “It was not until I was on set and saw what was involved that I knew that the sum total of my life had led to this. I was at home.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje as Killer Croc in the 2016 supervillain film Suicide Squad. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Alamy

His broken family history was harder to resolve. Though he is now more in touch with his Nigerian heritage, he never discussed the horrors of his childhood with his birth parents. He says: “They just thought, ‘we did it all for you’. “I felt there was quite a bit of denial in that belief.”

He talks a little about subsequent difficulties in establishing relationships of his own: “There was this theme of abandonment in my life, and subsequently you make sure you reject before you get rejected, you put a wall up.” He hasn’t ruled out marriage and children: “I am looking forward to that phase. I was 16 when this happened, I was 52 yesterday. I have had plenty of time to process it and my career as an actor has been a good tool for that. You can go through phases of bitterness and anger and hatred, but it has to have an expiry date, otherwise you are at a dead end.”

He became a Buddhist 27 years ago, and has been practising a Japanese regime of chanting morning and evening for 15 years. He says: “It allows you to hear the inner voice and not the anger. Once I started listening to that voice that’s when I started writing.”

The first scene that he wrote was a long imaginary conversation with his foster mother, with whom he had the complicated relationship at the heart of the film. Loyalty to your parents is a powerful emotion, and Akinnuoye-Agbaje has had far more reason to wrestle with it than most. That first conversation he wrote down was an attempt to capture all the conflicted feelings in that. He says: “You have to remember that, whatever the motivation, they were quite extraordinary human beings to take on 10 Nigerian children in a terraced house in Tilbury in the 1970s, where no one had seen a black child before. They were ostracised because of it. It wasn’t a picnic for them. I had to weigh all of that up.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Damson Idris playing the young Akinnuoye-Agbaje. Photograph: Angus Young

They became closer in some ways after he became an adult and established a life for himself that no one had imagined. He says: “In the years before they passed, in 2006, they tried to spend more time with me. That was perhaps to make up for what they knew was a very tough upbringing. What I hope comes through is that despite everything they were to a large degree heroes to me. Flawed, but we all have parents that do both good and do bad.”

Were they aware of the script and his ideas for the film, before they died?

“They knew I was writing it, they had seen a short of it I made. My father said: ‘All you can do is tell the truth.’”

What does he think they would have made of it? Would they have recognised themselves?

“I’m sure they would. And I think they would have been quite proud to be honest,” he says.

For himself, he hopes that now the film is done and out he can move on to directing other stories, in a different vein. His acting will continue, too, though I suggest there will never be a role to match that which he took on aged 16 in Tilbury. He smiles: “It’s true, I was acting my butt off every day just to stay alive. Those were the best performances I ever gave.”

Farming is released on 11 October