“In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast” features intimate, in-depth conversations with today’s most noteworthy film, television, and theater actors and creators. Full of both know-how and inspiration, “In the Envelope” airs weekly to cover everything from practical advice on navigating the industry, to how your favorite projects are made, to personal stories of success and failure alike. Join host and Awards Editor Jack Smart for this guide on how to live the creative life from those who are doing it every day. This episode is brought to you by AppleTV+.
“It is important to refill the creative well,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, speaking to what artists, and in particular actors, can do amid the ongoing global pandemic of 2020. “That can come through many ways, be it just taking a step back, doing something else, painting, reading, just watching great performances. I think acting can be so all-consuming and immersive, you realize if you do it a lot you can also miss out on life!”
It’s one of many pearls of wisdom the British actor, who has lent her chameleonic skills to everything from period dramas to sci-fi adventures in the last decade, provides in her “In the Envelope” interview. Since studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, appearing on London stages and TV series, co-starring with Jude Law in “Hamlet” on the West End and Broadway, then breaking out with her British Independent Film Award–winning turn in the feature film “Belle,” Mbatha-Raw has dazzled us in “Larry Crowne,” “Undercovers,” “Beyond the Lights,” “Concussion,” “Miss Sloane,” “Black Mirror: San Junipero,” “The Cloverfield Paradox,” “A Wrinkle in Time,” “Fast Color,” “Motherless Brooklyn,” and more. As part of the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours, she was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to drama.
This year, Mbatha-Raw played two buzzy roles: Jennifer Hosten (Miss Grenada 1970), in “Misbehaviour,” Philippa Lowthorpe, Gaby Chiappe, and Rebecca Frayn’s feature film about the 1970 Miss World pageant; and Hannah Shoenfeld on AppleTV+’s drama “The Morning Show,” opposite Jennifer Aniston, Mark Duplass, Reese Witherspoon, Billy Crudup, Karen Pittman, and Steve Carell. Next, she’ll be seen in Jessica Swale’s “Summerland.”
She’s also expanded her work as an activist, supporting the UN refugee agency UNHCR, and as a writer, penning a recent Harper’s Bazaar article titled “Lockdown in La La Land” that articulates her thoughts on an actor’s place amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re not frontline workers, actors,” she points out. “Art definitely has its place. But in a crisis, it’s very humbling, I think, for everybody to remember and appreciate the people that perhaps we have overlooked, the healthcare workers, the grocery store workers, all of those people that have become so essential to us in this time.”
With lockdown delaying Mbatha-Raw’s work on Marvel Studios and Disney+’s upcoming “Loki” series, she’s been painting, stocking shelves at her local Los Angeles grocery store, and recording Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” for an audiobook. Finding ways to keep flexing acting muscles is a tricky ongoing challenge, she says. “You can do a monologue on Zoom or go on Instagram Live or whatever, but it’s really such a collaborative business—which is why I love it.”
READ: How to Become an Actor in the U.K.
Taking us inside her character-building process, Mbatha-Raw reveals the tricks she uses for any role, no matter how different from the previous one. “Music is very helpful for me,” she says. “Nearly always, I make a playlist. That can be any number of things, from a song or a piece of music that will get me into an emotional place.... I think it can put you in a certain place to release certain emotions, be they joyful or more somber or more intense.”
She also considers the outside-in approach of costuming—in a corset, “you were supposed to be dainty and small,” which alters “how you breathe, how you speak”—and even uses fragrances to get into the zone: “I’ve often chosen different scents for different characters, either if it’s a modern thing, a perfume that I think the character would wear, or if it’s more looking at aromatherapy and looking at how scent changes your mood.”
In terms of approaching text, what Mbatha-Raw looks for is a character arc, with beginning, middle, and end. “You don’t have to be the lead. You don’t have to have all of the screen time, but you need to have a journey. You need to feel like your character starts at one place and ends somewhere else. Sometimes I read scripts that, even though the character is on every page of the script, what is their arc? What are they learning? How has this journey changed them?”
How Mimi Leder Built the Feminist World of ‘The Morning Show’ From the Inside Out That’s what made working with director Mimi Leder, writers Kerry Ehrin and Jay Carson, and her co-stars on “The Morning Show” so exciting; her arc as Hannah ends up structuring the first season’s pivotal twists. “You want, as an artist, to be given the chance to make choices, so that if you know where you’re going, you can structure the rhythm of everything to make it more satisfying,” Mbatha-Raw says.
“Listen, we don’t know what our arc is in our lives!” she adds. “I don’t know how this is going to end for me, but I’m just living in the moment.” To listen to Mbatha-Raw’s enlightening interview in full, tune in at any of the podcast platforms below.
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