The future memories of Paapa Essiedu (2024)

Paapa Essiedu has taken me to a cafe in North London for Colombian eggs and coffee, and is recounting his worst nightmare, which might also be the best thing that ever happened to him. It was 2014, two years after he’d graduated from the prestigious Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and he’d been cast as an understudy in Sam Mendes’ production of King Lear at the National Theatre. The idea was to watch, learn, and also deliver a few lines, but he was really there to observe. Understudies don’t normally rehearse with the main cast, but Essiedu had asked Mendes if it was OK for him to sit in and take notes. Mendes agreed, so he silently watched the cast, and every night he’d go home and reflect on what he’d seen. He told himself that it would come in handy one day.

It was the night before press night, and Essiedu could hear the scene – Act III, scene 3, nearing the interval – but Sam Troughton, playing the Machiavellian bastard Edmund, kept cutting out during sentences. “Something was going wrong right there on stage. It was as if he was muted after he started speaking,” Essiedu recalls. Backstage, adrenaline built among the crew. They realised Troughton was losing his voice in real time.

“It was kind of exciting,” Essiedu remembers. Mendes came over to him. “He’s normally the coolest, calmest, most chill man, but I saw beads and beads of sweat on his forehead,” Essiedu says. Mendes said: “I’m going to need you to go on stage, and help me finish this play.” Did he need a script? Essiedu shook his head. “I told him, ‘I’m going to be fine.’”

He was more than fine. The whole thing felt like it took place in slow-motion, and even now, Essiedu says he can’t remember what happened once he was on stage. But he does remember Mendes addressing the audience during the interval. “Tonight, you’re seeing two actors’ worst nightmares. The first is an actor losing their voice in front of 1,200 people. The other is an understudy who hasn’t been rehearsed into the role being forced to go on.” A pause. “Enjoy”.

“I’m not going to lie, it was thrilling,” Essiedu says. “It had a heightened state of readiness to it. There was a level of tension that wasn’t normally there.”

Essiedu, now 31, made headlines for saving the second half of the play, and the next night, he went on and did the full thing to critical acclaim. Critic Mark Lawson wrote that “the last hour of that King Lear was like seeing a football team still going on to win the World Cup after having a star player sent off.”

Troughton’s voice returned the following day – so Essiedu resumed his place as the understudy after one-and-a-half shows. “I do wonder if that was the formative moment, the way it gave me that taste for being front and centre,” he says. “I was disappointed to have to relinquish it.” He gives a soft shrug, which says: it’s OK. What he didn’t know then was that whatever he relinquished that night wasn’t relinquished for long – Paapa Essiedu found his voice as someone else lost theirs and ever since, he has been figuring out how best to use it.

In 2016, two years after his unexpected leading role, Essiedu went on to play Hamlet in Simon Godwin’s production at the RSC, and he infused his Danish prince with enough vitality to make a 423-year-old character feel fresh. When he won the Ian Charleson Award for his theatre work, it was because he was capable of wielding major emotional states – cynicism, callousness, intelligence, wit, sweetness, playfulness, chilling contempt – like they were his own personal Infinity Stones. Whether in Channel 4 abduction drama Kiri or last year’s queer indie film Femme, Essiedu always skews to the profound. “He is a very funny, serious fella,” says Lennie James, who earlier this year played opposite him in A Number at The Old Vic. “There’s very little faff around Paapa, he doesn’t make it more complicated than it has to be.”

After our breakfast in January, Essiedu and I regularly stayed in touch. One of our last conversations took place in early May, when he was in New York to attend the Met Gala and I’d just got back from IKEA. He was also there to promote his new film Men, directed by Alex Garland. Essiedu arrived in New York after spending a few weeks off-grid in Central America – though even during this quiet period he called, accidentally, butt-dialling me while getting off a coach in the middle of Rio de Janeiro. When he intentionally phones me, he is getting ready to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he will wear a petrol-blue flocked velvet suit from Virgil Abloh’s final Off-White couture collection. Despite his reservations – of getting lost amid the Cara Delavignes of the night, of only being asked because he happened to be in town – he is celebrated the next day by critics both actual and armchair for his insouciant take on the gala’s theme of “gilded glamour”, eschewing costume-y notions for something both contemporary and subdued.

In Men, which stars Jessie Buckley and Rory Kinnear, Essiedu plays James, the husband of Buckley’s character Harper, who, in the opening seconds of the film, falls from a window to his death. Harper retreats to the countryside to grieve, but she is tormented both by the village locals (all played by Kinnear) and complex feelings over her husband’s death. Garland’s previous films Ex Machina and Annihilation are dystopian sci-fi stories about artificial intelligence and alien life forms and the way they intersect with humanity. Comparatively, Men is less cerebral, and less interested in playing human nature off against external forces than examining human nature itself from fascinating new angles. It is also absolutely terrifying.

Essiedu met Garland in late 2020 to discuss the film during the surreal “substantial meal” period of the pandemic. “It was me, Alex, and a scotch egg, as well as a few negronis.” He likes the fact Garland “is an auteur without the domineering narcissism” and says the filming, which was done over a two day period in early 2021, was collaborative and almost shot like a play – tight profile shots, and a lot of room for he and Buckley to figure it out themselves. “Jessie is one of the most phenomenal performers I’ve ever had the privilege of being in the room with,” he says. “It’s kind of scary to behold.”

Garland was a writer and novelist before he became a director, and instead of just explaining James, he gave Essiedu something to help him figure the character out – a 10,000-year-old shark tooth. “He collects fossils and stuff like that, and he said he was fascinated by the kind of latent violence it contained,” he says. “Alex is a deep-thinker, and he works in a non-literal way. Which I think makes a lot of sense when you see the film.”

The role is a sharp pivot for Essiedu, who people mostly know from his 2020 performance in I May Destroy You, written by and starring his friend and fellow Guildhall student Michaela Coel. The show broached sexual assault and trauma with a previously-unseen dexterity; it was unbearable and messy but funny and weird, too, becoming the most talked-about show in the early months of the pandemic. Essiedu played Kwame, a charming fitness instructor who is sexually assaulted by a man he is hooking up with. The aftermath of the rape is handled appallingly by the police because he’s Black, because he’s gay, because he’s a man, and so it’s understandable when Kwame yo-yos between emotional states, from reckless and destructive to simply lost at sea. Essiedu is most transfixing when Kwame seems to be eroding before our very eyes, but he knows how to unite the light and dark in characters. When Adele, no less, writes on Instagram that watching the show, she had “never felt so many emotions at once,” you know you’ve made something sublime.

Nobody, least of all Coel and Essiedu, expected this. The two of them would marvel over the show’s success during lockdown-mandated jogs. “The whole thing was so surprising,” he says. “We didn’t know it would be massive. It’s not as if I was in a Scorsese film.”

The last two years have been bittersweet. “I’ve had some really amazing moments, as well as some really low ones, like losing people and being isolated. It’s been so significant for me – there were very high highs, but very low lows, too.” There have been moments of vindication, and elation, even. And yet… “When I talk to my therapist, and we go back, back, back to that period… I’d say there is a real sense of being stretched in two directions, in quite an extreme way.”

Put it this way: he’s learned that memories can be impossible to control or tame – like the time he went to Broadway Market during the pandemic. Essiedu was born in Walthamstow, North-East London, and was raised by his mother, who worked in fashion. Both his parents were Ghanaian – his mother died when Essiedu was in his final year at Guildhall, and his father, who returned to Ghana when Essiedu was a baby, died when he was 14. “I popped into Percy Ingle’s to get a doughnut, and I just started crying.” He felt unable to process what was happening. “I was overwhelmed by this feeling of my mum. I couldn’t understand it at first, why being there was making me so upset. But then I remembered, there was a Percy Ingle’s round the corner from where I grew up. Me and mum would go there. I would have been seven years old.” He thinks the staff uniform, which hasn’t changed since he was a kid and looks almost Victorian, transported him in that moment. “It’s not looking at a photo of mum that sends me,” he says, after a pause. “Memory is wild, the way it can do that. It can be stored in objects, places, and weird recesses of the brain.”

Over breakfast, Essiedu showed me a gold chain that belonged to his mother – something he found while clearing out her house a few years ago. “I was up in the loft, and as soon as I found it, the memory of her wearing it pinged in my mind. She wore it all the time… it makes me feel connected to her.”

It’s been hard, but Essiedu has tried to stay connected to Ghana, too. Mercifully, he made it to Ghana at the end of 2020, during “the brief bit before Boris went on TV and cancelled Christmas.” Essiedu says he noticed a “spiritually different” response to the pandemic there. In January 2021, shooting his new Sky sci-fi show The Lazarus Project in Prague, Barcelona, and Bristol, the sets were eerily deserted – he likens the markets and gothic city squares of Europe to being “as if Dementors [the dark fiends from Harry Potter] had sucked the soul out of the entire city.”

But in Ghana, he found a sense of peace. “I just feel very calm in Ghana. I think it’s looking around and seeing Black people who look like me, and seeing members of my actual family. Hearing people speak the languages my mum spoke when I was a child. She was very linguistically talented, she could speak Twi, Ga, and Fante. Those sounds were in my house, you know? On the phone, on the sofa, in the kitchen, they were everywhere. I miss it a lot.” He pauses for a moment. “I don’t always feel the loss of those things until I’m back there.”

Back when he was 11, he was accepted into the nearby Forest school through a Tory policy called “government-assisted places”, designed to get gifted children from lower-income families into public schools. “The irony is, it wasn’t a particularly fancy school at all,” he says. “It was like being on The Only Way Is Essex.” He describes it as a “lose-lose situation. If I’m going to go to a school like that, at least teach me Latin or something.” He pauses. “It was a weird place.”

I ask him if he liked school. He shakes his head. “It was weird. Race was a big thing at that school. How can I say this… it seemed there was a notable divide between ‘majority’ and ‘minority’.” When pupils played football in the playground, it was always the white kids versus the non-white kids. “Our differentiation was normalised, and the connotations that come from that were, too. It was a real fucked-up petri dish of a place.”

At 18, he went to Guildhall, where he was in the same year as Coel. They first met at recall auditions, and as two of only three non-white students in their year, “you’re kind of immediately bound by your shared experience. We were from the same part of East London. I suppose we came into the environment with the same sense of, ‘What the fuck is all this?’ She’s a wonderful woman, and one of the closest people in my life. I can’t imagine life without her in it.”

He found it hard at Guildhall, but today he says “it was what it was” and that he has a good relationship with the school. He occasionally mentors third-year students, “which is important for them to transition into the big, bad world.” And when his mother died, the student support was exceptional. “School was a coping mechanism for something that had been so impactful and traumatic for me, and I wasn’t ready to deal with it,” he says, adding that he only took one day off before returning to Guildhall. “The structure, routine, and intensity of drama school helped me in that period. It provided me with what I needed, and it helped me push away some of the deep, deep, intense sadness.”

Talk soon turns to therapy, which he started four years ago, “ages after my mum had died, ages after drama school, and everything I went through there. It wasn’t one thing that happened. I just wasn’t happy, and I crucially didn’t feel capable. I didn’t feel connected to the people and things around me.”

Now, he likens Paapa (pre-therapy) and Paapa (post-therapy) to chalk and cheese. “I wouldn’t be able to talk the way I’m talking to you now without it,” he admits. It’s helped him work through what you could call having-it-all syndrome – “one of my anxieties is not feeling there’s enough time in the day to live the life I want to live. Spend time with my partner, work, better myself, the gym, therapy, watching films,” even doing nothing. It got to the point where he developed stress-related insomnia. “So I had to make a conscious decision about how I spent my time. I started saying to certain people: look, I will meet you – when or if I can.” But he can’t be on tap for everyone. He’s had to learn to make peace with it, even if it upsets people.

Over breakfast, we talk about the ‘partygate’ scandal, as it becomes painfully clear the Government failed to hold itself to the same standards as those imposed on the rest of us during lockdown. The scandal hasn’t gone away since we first discussed it in January – the collective anger has been boiling and boiling, spilling over and scalding everything it touches.

I tell him that last April my grandparents both died, just a few hours apart, and I didn’t get to see them before they passed. Essiedu nods. He had to make sacrifices during the pandemic, too. “I lost an uncle and an aunt,” he says quietly. “On my dad’s side of the family. They died within days of each other.”

This loss occurred just as he was beginning filming The Lazarus Project early last year. “This was a man who I had been estranged from, essentially, for a long time. But I was getting back in contact with him, and then he got COVID.” House visits were forbidden, and then, when his uncle was admitted to hospital, visits were not allowed there, either. His uncle was alone. Essiedu’s voice begins to slow, he struggles to get the words out. Once his uncle was in hospital, his wife, Essiedu’s aunt, died at home. “There was a whole thing,” he says.

He is still figuring it out in his head. “It would have made a difference if he could have had actual people there, talking to him. You just know it would. But we couldn’t do it. And then… that’s the thing with death, when they’re gone, they’re gone. There’s no reevaluation, no ‘if I’d done this, then this.’” We live in a world where you can undo an email if you’re quick enough. “But with the brain, there’s a finality to it.”

Six people were at the funeral. “The fucked-up thing is, no matter how rich you are, or how poor, pretty much everyone has got a fucking story as horrendous as that,” he says.

No wonder people are angry and upset; everyone has a story of trauma and suppressed grief. He should know. “But there’s a whole other stream of opportunity attached to that suffering, you know.” I ask him what he means. “I think there’s brotherhood, there’s connection in the fact that we can both kind of share this story with each other. I suppose the reason it all feels quite relevant now is because I’m doing this play…”

Yes, the play. A Number is a tight, hour-long two-hander about fathers and sons and missed opportunities (and cloning). The play uses a father (Lennie James) cloning his son (Essiedu) as a way to ask questions about identity and belonging. Previous iterations were more about the threat of our ability to play God – AKA the cloning of it all. This version ruminates heavily on male identity, and what kind of person needs to recreate (and recreate and recreate) his son. Essiedu plays several ‘numbers’, all shaped by the circumstances of their cloning, and have wildly different relationships with their father as a result.

Curiously, The Lazarus Project, which will air on Sky later this year, touches on these themes, too. “It’s basically got a parallel timeline going on,” Essiedu says. “What would happen if you lost a loved one but you had the ability to undo that? What lengths would you go to, and to what extent would you compromise your personal code of morality?”

The show’s creator, Joe Barton, who wrote the BBC crime drama Giri/Haji, says they cast Essiedu after seeing him in I May Destroy You and wanted someone with his particularly smart, sensitive presence. “People are drawn to Paapa in real life – he has a relatability that we needed. We wanted someone audiences would stick with.”

Essiedu brings up children before I have the chance, but all morning I’d wondered if he wanted to be a father himself. “When I think about having children, there’s a realisation that your kids will have a very, very different life to you. Because we have settled down in places very different to where we’re from. Obviously, for me it was hard being poor, and being around people who weren’t poor. But the thing I realised is: the adult I’ve become has only been able to become that adult because of the childhood I had. So I have made peace with it, in a way.”

He’s grateful for all of it. “I know I was fortunate to have had the parents I’ve had, while also feeling the loss of those parents very keenly. And I can’t imagine wanting kids is not related to my desire to remake that parent-child dynamic.”

I think I understand what he means by the end of our interview. He says the desire manifests in strange and unusual ways, not unlike the doughnut at Percy Ingle’s, or the feeling of being back in Ghana.

“I find myself in situations, like a taxi driver will talk about going for a pint with his grown-up son. Or someone says they’re going to watch the Bond movie with their dad. To some people, that must be really normal, almost boring,” he says. “To me, I find it incredibly moving!” He is beaming as he says this and his eyes are shining a little. “Really, if I’m being honest, while I think babies are wonderful, beautiful, even… I just want to be an old adult with an adult son.”

It is one of the most profound things he says during our time together, and I think about it for weeks. A desire to become not just a father, but a friend, to a grown-up son who doesn’t yet exist.

The Lazarus Project is available on Sky Max and NOW from 16 June.

Chris Mandle is a writer and editor based in London.

Photography by Jeff Hahn
Styling by Angelo Mitakos
Set Design by Bryony Edwards
Hair by Chris Okonta
Grooming by Carlos Ferraz

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