Whether she’s a chicken-obsessed schoolboy or a hapless cop fighting a plot to bring down Notting Hill carnival, the comic actor’s dizzying range means she may soon need a bigger awards shelf
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n 2020, as long-overdue conversations about race rippled out across the world, Gbemisola Ikumelo, now 39, made a decision. “I had this soul-destroying experience on a job,” she says, hersunny demeanour at odds with the grim tale. She decided to post online about the microaggressions she had endured while appearing in a play some years before, making peace with the fact that it could affect her chances at future roles, and shaking as she typed out the thread. A day passed, “and I just heard my phone going ding, ding, ding. I was convinced it was going to be backlash – but it was people sending their congratulations.” Ikumelo had been nominated for a Bafta for her short, Brain in Gear. “I felt like God was going: ‘Don’t worry.’ It was a beautiful moment.” She won that Bafta and has since scooped another. “When I won the first one, I was living in a small flat, and I felt like the [statuette] was judging me,” she laughs. “I was like, I might have to refurb or move. Now I have an office, so they’re in a very reasonable place.”
