Sophie Okonedo has an Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda, a celebrated career spanning three decades and a résumé packed with acclaimed films. What she hasn’t had, she says, is nearly as many leading roles as people might think.
“People often think I’ve played loads of them, and I’m like, I really haven’t. I just shout from the back and hope people will notice,” the 58-year-old actress tells me on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast.
And sometimes, getting the roles she actually wants has meant not working at all.
“I stayed unemployed for quite a long time,” she says of holding out for independent films that can take years to come together — if they happen at all.
Now, after what she calls a “lifetime career” getting to this point, Okonedo is having something of a moment, with two of the year’s most compelling indies arriving by coincidence within months of each other: Mouse, set in small-town Arkansas, and Clarissa, a modern-day reimagining of the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway set in Lagos.
The films couldn’t be more different, but both offer Okonedo the kind of rich, challenging work she’s spent a career pursuing — sometimes to the detriment of her bank account.
“I have over the years been attached to quite a few projects, but I’ve either run out of money or had to take a job,” she tells me on today’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “What happens is that they’re about to go and then they don’t go, and if you want to really do those movies, you kind of have to just stop working, which you can’t always afford to do.”
In Mouse, now in theaters from IFC Films, she plays a classically trained British musician who finds herself in small-town Arkansas, raising a daughter with big dreams of stardom but still a little distant from the Southern community that surrounds her. The film was shot on location in North Little Rock, Arkansas, the hometown of Kelly O’Sullivan, who wrote the screenplay and co-directs it with Alex Thompson.
She joined forces with another pair of directors, twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, for the Nigeria-set Clarissa, transferring Mrs. Dalloway to a wealthy modern-day enclave in Lagos. Though Okonedo’s family has Nigerian roots and she had visited Lagos decades ago, the film’s shooting locations were nearly as unfamiliar to her as North Little Rock. “One of the things that really appealed to me about this whole film, just on a personal level, was that I thought, ‘I’m gonna go on a voyage of discovery here,’” Okonedo tells me. “It lived up to that, and we got to create some art all along the way.”
She calls it a happy accident that Mouse, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February, and Clarissa, which launched at Cannes in May, are coming out within months of each other; “the conversation about both of them helps each other,” Okonedo continues.
Though her role in Mouse is more of a supporting turn — most of her scenes are alongside the phenomenal 19-year-old Katherine Mallen Kupferer, who also starred in O’Sullivan and Thompson’s previous film Ghostlight — Okonedo is at the titular heart of Clarissa; she earned a Gotham Award nomination for lead performance. “I’ve really walked a long path to get here,” Okonedo tells me. “I’m just enjoying every minute.”
Hear much more from Okonedo on today’s episode, which also features a conversation between me, Christopher Rosen and returning guest Sean Fennessey about how the year’s box office hits and misses will fit into the Oscar race. You Can See Everything seems to grow more powerful each week as its box office keeps soaring, and the race already includes certified mega-hits like The Odyssey and Project Hail Mary. But how do you account for the box office impact of something smaller — like The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, or modest summertime hit The Invite? And how are the midterm elections going to affect all of this? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of takes to share.
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