🎧 Ryan Coogler Wrote ‘Sinners’ for Wunmi Mosaku — She Just Didn’t Know It

The Oscar-nominated star on her breakout role. Plus: Which Spirit Award wins really matter

FEELING BLESSED Sinners best supporting actress nominee Wunmi Mosaku tells me the Nominees Luncheon last week was the “first time I really celebrated the nomination.” (Monica Schipper/WireImage)

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Ryan Coogler wrote the role of Annie in Sinners with Wunmi Mosaku in mind. He just didn’t tell Mosaku until after she auditioned multiple times.

“I didn’t know that Ryan had written that role with me in mind until my last day (of the casting process),” Mosaku tells me on today’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. She says she’s not sure if it would have psyched her out to know how closely Coogler had already associated her with the character, a powerful Hoodoo healer with a complicated relationship to Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke.

“I do think there’s something, when you feel like out of all the people they saw, they thought you were the one who could do the best for this role — that gives us a little bit of confidence and self-belief,” she explains. “Whereas I think the times I’ve had a role offered to me, I’ve had far more self-doubt about my capability. It just feels a bit like, ‘Are you sure?’”

NEW CLASSIC “I don’t get bored talking about Sinners for some reason,” Mosaku tells me of the 16-time Oscar nominee. “When you get good questions, you learn something new again.” (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Born in Nigeria and raised in Manchester, England, the 39-year-old Mosaku has been on an ascent for the last decade, thanks to roles on the Marvel series Loki and the HBO show Lovecraft Country. But Sinners put her into a new stratosphere: Her performance has earned multiple award nominations, including the best supporting actress Oscar.

Still, despite having a part written directly for her, Mosaku says she had to wait until she was on the Louisiana set of Sinners to actually embody Annie. “I felt like I really found her through the costumes, the dialect work, the relationship with Michael,” Mosaku says. “I had done research on Hoodoo (an African American folk spiritual tradition), but it didn’t feel vivid until I was in Louisiana, until I met Hoodoo practitioners, until I was in the world. Going to Haus of Hoodoo, just being around priestesses, I was like, no, I’m getting it now.”

Many of the most powerful parts of Sinners unfold without dialogue, whether in the already iconic musical sequences or in the crackling tension and years of shared history that Mosaku and Jordan convey through their characters. But Mosaku, a graduate of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, has done her share of memorizing long monologues and pages and pages of scripts, and tells me in our conversation a technique for memorization I’d never heard before: blue paper, which allowed Mosaku to overcome the dyslexia diagnosis she received as a teenager.

“I used to fall asleep while reading, thinking I was bored. But it turns out my eyes would just shut because they were tired of the stress,” she says. Printing script pages on blue paper, “revolutionized everything for me.”

Hear more about that in my conversation with Mosaku on today’s episode, which also includes an awards season check-in with Jacqueline Coley, Rotten Tomatoes’ awards editor and host of Seen on the Screen. Jacqueline and I look back at Sunday’s Film Independent Spirit Awards wins, where Train Dreams won multiple awards and Rose Byrne took best lead performer, and speculate on a few Oscar races that might be closer than they seem. Plus, we look ahead to how Sunday’s BAFTA Awards and the upcoming Screen Actors Guild Actor Awards (both places where Mosaku is a nominee) will shed even more light on where the race stands.

And before I go: Make sure to watch this amazing video where more than 30 Oscar nominees — including Stellan Skarsgård, Delroy Lindo, Amy Madigan — tell Kara Warner and me about their favorite Oscar-winning films.

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