The most captivating actors are those who step into worlds painting shades of our own. Those who remind us of ourselves; our emotions, fears and desires. British actors Archie Madekwe (fresh from leading summer blockbuster Gran Turismo and about to switch gears for fall’s cult-movie-in-waiting: Saltburn) and Josh O’Connor – in conversation here – embody this; two studious craftspeople who angle themselves towards each role with an openness and freedom to adapt and absorb. 

Watching Black Panther with his dad was a breakthrough moment for Madekwe. A superhero movie created by a Black cast and crew for a Black audience; the British actor remembers his dad being moved to tears by the importance of this movie. Madekwe intends to build on this, embracing roles and projects infrequently geared towards people of colour. And this passion continues beyond the screen. Working with educational non-profit The Black Curriculum to promote the teaching of Black history in schools across the UK, Madekwe is helping to build non-traditional pathways that mirror his own – promoting new voices to the fore. 

Josh O’Connor: Archie! 
Archie Madekwe: It’s so funny to be doing this with you, I love it. [both laugh] 

JO: I thought we could start off by trying to remember when we first met. 
AM: I try to think about this all the time and I don’t [remember], but I do have a distinct memory of us working on something together and walking into a read-through, looking at each other and going, “Hey, we know each other!” But not knowing why. [both laugh] 

JO: You’re right.
AM: We had mutual friends from my drama school. Everyone knows each other and that’s how it goes. That was so many years ago. 

JO: You really made me laugh [on that job]. Still to this day, Only Time by Enya reminds me of you. There’s a scene where lots of people are dying really traumatic deaths and then when you died it was like, “Oh… he’s gone.” [laughs] 
AM: Hold on, you’ve misremembered this completely because I actually had quite a dramatic death, thanks very much! I was shot and fell off a roof. 

JO: Archie, blink and you’ll miss it, mate. [both laugh] 
AM: Every other moment in the show was blink and you’ll miss it. It was a real lesson in how sometimes a job isn’t about your character and you just have to be at peace with that. 

JO: On that same show I had terrible eczema on my hands and if I opened them a little bit… 
AM: It would just start cracking and bleeding, I remember that. 

JO: I used to have to hold my hands like this [clenches fists]. I was the romantic lead and there was a scene where I had to be handsome, romantic and brilliant. [Archie laughs] It was a kissing scene, and the director was like, “Can you put the hair behind her ear?” I was on steroids to get rid of the eczema, so I was really bloated too. They said ‘Action!’ and then into the frame came this bloody claw, it was so unattractive and awful. 
AM: We were cursed with hands on that job because Joseph Quinn shut his finger in a door and almost had to have his fucking finger amputated, do you remember that? He ignored it the entire time and then sent us a picture of him strapped to an IV in hospital like, “They’re going to have to take it off.” So for the rest of the show, they had to work out a way that a sword could chop his hand [both laugh]. He had his hand wrapped up in this big cloth because he had a massive cast on it… they had to chop the tip of his finger off.
It was so awful, it was such a great, funny, lovely job. 

JO: So, that’s how we met. This is quite fun because I know you went to BRIT School and stuff but I don’t know everything. Your sister is an actor as well, isn’t she? 
AM: My cousin [Ashley Madekwe].

JO: Was she doing it before you? 
AM: Yeah. Our family is quite unartistic apart from the two of us, we come from a family of plumbers and builders. She introduced me to seeing plays. I remember the very first play I saw was Little Sweet Thing by Roy Williams and just being really taken by it. I then went to the BRIT School and Ashley went there too. I had someone to watch and follow in their footsteps, she went to BRIT, so I went to BRIT, then she went to drama school and was a big advocate for my training. I’ve got mixed feelings about whether or not [going to a drama school] is necessary right now and I don’t believe every actor has to do it, but I’m really glad she pushed me to. She was a real inspiration to me growing up.

JO: Before drama school and all that stuff I’d go to the theatre quite a lot, I was very lucky because I grew up outside of London but my dad was an English teacher so he used to organise school trips to the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] and I would tag along. That was my first introduction to theatre, which was amazing. In terms of film, I remember whenever I watched any movie I thought it was unachievable because they’re all very handsome Hollywood men. Then I remember seeing Pete Postlethwaite and being like, “Oh he looks like someone I might know,” and I’m not putting shade on Pete Postlethwaite at all – it just felt more relatable. Was there anyone growing up you felt like you related to, or was there a performance that stuck with you? 
AM: Yeah there was. I had all of those same feelings and all the people were white, so I was like, “I guess it’s a real lost cause for me.” [laughs] When you see all these unbelievably handsome Hollywood men, it is difficult to see where you fit in that space. Then I saw Sophie Okonedo in a film called The Secret Life of Bees, which she did with Dakota Fanning, Alicia Keys and Queen Latifah, it’s a really beautiful film and she is so unbelievable in it. I remember looking her up, seeing that she was from London and that she was mixed race – she was a North Star for me. In my mind, she was the validation that I could do it, that there were people like me doing it.

JO: For me, seeing lots of men who didn’t look like anything I thought I could look like was weird, but the added layer of not seeing someone with the same colour skin as you must be so insane. This is a much bigger question, but do you feel like that has changed, and has it changed significantly enough? If you think about someone of a similar age to when you saw Sophie Okonedo, do you think there’s more available now? 
AM: It’s a huge question, the answer is yes and no. Some of the choices I make are to fill the spaces I haven’t seen myself in. A lot of the things I end up taking or the conversations I have about roles I want to do are about what I haven’t seen someone who looks like myself do, because not watching things like that growing up affects the way you think about yourself. Something like Black Panther is so moving, I remember taking my dad to see it and he had tears in his eyes – growing up he never thought he’d see something like that – a superhero and an audience full of young Black kids dressed up as a superhero celebrating themselves. It was a lovely moment seeing my dad be so emotionally moved by something like that. There are definitely more opportunities, but especially being mixed race, you’re in this weird middle ground of never being Black enough to play Black and never being white enough to play white – you’re in this weird ambiguity.

Riz Ahmed talks about it beautifully, he has an essay about casting in an amazing book called The Good Immigrant. He talks about casting in stages, stage one is playing a stereotype of your race and stage two is a subverted stereotype. For example, being cast as a doctor – other people could play it but there is a generalisation that South Asian people get good grades, so he’s the geeky friend. Stage three is the everyman and that’s the part you want to play, you’re farmer Joe, you’re the high-flying boss, whatever it is, your race doesn’t come into it at all, and they’re the parts we strive for. I’ve been really lucky in my career to play a bunch of those parts and that’s been lovely, but what I do find is that there aren’t lots of parts for people who look like me, and that is something I find interesting. Those stories very rarely get unearthed, so I’m developing a lot of stuff now and producing a few things for all people to feel like they see themselves, because those stories do exist.

“The great thing about our job is that everything is subjective, you can go and see something everybody loves and absolutely hate it, and that’s fine because that’s the way art works.”

JO: The first time I was aware of you, was The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? [Edward Albee’s 2000 play, Archie starred in a 2017 production at London’s Theatre Royal Haymarket]. Now people know you for your film and television work but like me, you started in the theatre and we both trained at very traditional British drama schools. LAMDA [The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, where Archie studied after BRIT School] was probably a bit more progressive, but in Bristol [Josh studied at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School] it was as if we were still in the times of Peter O’Toole, it was just theatre, theatre, theatre. I know you did a play earlier this year, but what is your relationship with theatre? I always remember two of the greatest performances I’ve ever seen on stage were Daniel Kaluuya in Sucker Punch and Mark Rylance in Jerusalem. Were your aspirations television and film or were they theatre? 
AM: It was theatre, I thought I was going to do theatre for years when I went to BRIT School.

JO: Before we go into that… I always imagine BRIT School as being this all-singing all-dancing place, but how does it work? 
AM: It’s an unbelievable school, at the time I was there it was the only free performing arts school in the country. It’s prestigious because of the musicians who went there: Amy Winehouse, Adele. But there is an incredible array of British acting talent, dancers and artists too. Not everyone who goes there sings and dances, you audition for a strand, so I did theatre.

JO: My experience of BRIT School was that there was a girl in my school in rural England – FKA twigs – who went, and we were all like, “She’s gone to London to this special school.” And I was like, “I want to go to London to this special school!” She was amazing. Do you know Laura Dockrill?
AM: So well, I love Laura so much.

JO: I don’t know her very well, but we worked together years ago. She told me a story about walking the halls of BRIT School and you’d hear this voice, you’d go in and it’d be Adele. It must have been quite inspiring, not just to be around actors, but to be around singers.
AM: It’s unbelievable. That is very real, you’re walking around surrounded by such an immense amount of talent. Every week there would be gigs, concerts, dance recitals, all these things where you could go and take that in, which is a real privilege. All of that stuff inspires you, whether it’s directly related to what you’re doing or not, just to be immersed in such an artistic day-to-day life was unbelievable. A lot of us didn’t realise how lucky we were until we left and I’m still really involved with a lot of stuff from BRIT, I go back a lot and talk to students.

JO: After that, you went straight to LAMDA at eighteen didn’t you?
AM: No I had one year out where I did some really random things like work in a lion orphanage in South Africa. I signed with my agent from a showcase we did at the end of BRIT. It’s interesting because BRIT doesn’t let you audition or have an agent, but you have a celebration evening and a lot of agents come to that because they want to see who’s leaving. I signed with the person who is still my agent now. But you asked about first theatre experiences, and I remember we had to speak about a play for our application. Apart from Ashley’s plays, I’d never been to see any serious theatre, the school I went to before was an all-boys rugby school and I was very much the odd one out, I was one of three kids doing drama. We didn’t necessarily get to see Shakespeare plays, we did things like the Shakespeare Schools Festival, but I’d never been to the National or the RSC. I remember scrolling through Theatre Weekly and being like, “I have to see a play so I can talk about it in my application,” and I went to see That Face by Polly Stenham with Lindsay Duncan. That has stayed with me forever because it was just such a tour de force performance.

JO: Also, that was a real moment. When Polly Stenham wrote That Face and Tusk Tusk was around the time when Skins was out and it really captured the zeitgeist of that time, she’s such an amazing writer. 
AM: I remember thinking to myself, “OK, this is doing something for me that it doesn’t do for everyone else,” because I looked over at my dad and step-mum at the time and they were both asleep. [both laugh] I was like, “How are you not feeling what I’m feeling watching this?!” It was so funny. LAMDA was a very different experience. I had come from a very mixed, diverse, liberal performing arts school where I knew what a version of the industry would look like. We were performing all of these unbelievable playwrights of colour and playwrights from all over the world, but then I went to LAMDA where there were two people of colour in a year. This isn’t just LAMDA specifically, I think this is a lot of prestigious UK drama schools, the way the industry is presented to you looks very different. I really treasure the experience I had at BRIT because I had that at the back of my mind to think about how it could be different to what LAMDA looked like. I knew there was a place for me in the industry. I thank BRIT for cementing an idea of myself, because if it was only based on drama school I would never have felt the same way. It’s seen that it isn’t a place that was made for you, so you’re going to have to play catch up with everyone else who is miles ahead, just because of how they’ve grown up or what they look like. It was a very strange time for me.

JO: I totally recognise that. The faces I saw at drama school didn’t represent the industry I went into and the society we live in. It always felt a bit backwards. You alluded to this in the beginning, but I always thought you weren’t a real actor until you’re trained. 
AM: I thought that too.

JO: There’s a big snobbery about it. Dan Kaluuya is one of the greatest of our time and I don’t think he went to drama school. 
AM: You’ve probably felt it too, but I’ve learned most lessons working on the job. I left in my first term of third year at LAMDA to do The Goat, which was then a lovely full circle moment with Sophie Okonedo playing my mum – that was a big moment for me. It was her, Damien Lewis and Jason Hughes directed by Ian Rickson. That was an education three years at drama school couldn’t teach me.

JO: I agree with you. Obviously, the stuff I’ve learned most is from being in the professional industry, but how do you think you did benefit from drama school? 
AM: Technique. I got a toolbox of things. I don’t think I’d be able to technically sustain my voice for eight shows a week had I not gone to drama school and thought about things like that. What drama school gave me was the confidence to walk into a room with Damien Lewis and Sophie Okonedo and rehearse a play, get it wrong sometimes or make a choice and the choice not be right, having fucked up a bunch of times in front of people before. Drama school is such a weird place because you go to get things ‘wrong’ for three years and then all of a sudden you fancy someone in your year, and you’ve got friends, so you don’t want to do anything because you’re trying to be too cool. I remember thinking, “This is a disaster, everyone is so judgemental and no one wants to do anything because everyone’s too scared of being judged.” [laughs]

“I feel incredibly passionate about this job giving us an unbelievable platform to make the world better and amplify things through the stories we tell.”

JO: That’s the whole irony of drama school. The biggest selling point is having three years to take the biggest risks possible, but I would argue that the thirteen other people in my year at drama school were way worse than any reviewer or critic. 
AM: You’d get out of class sometimes and people would be like, “Oh my god, did you see the way that person did that monologue?” And I’d think, “I am never going to do anything that feels brave at this school.” Then eventually you do, and you get over yourself. There are definitely important things I took from drama school, but the biggest lessons come after however many years. No matter how much you want something, I know I probably got a little bit lazy with drama school; there are ways of doing something without really doing it, and making it seem like you did it. But when you have the added pressure of being on a job working with people you respect, being documented forever and people coming to watch, all of those things start playing in your head and there is an extra layer of pressure. Often people learn best under pressure, things come out of pressure because when we’re lazy some things may not present themselves.

JO: Having left drama school and going into the industry, did you feel any sense of something being too big? I think back to my first few jobs, they were very small jobs on fringe theatre or a day on a television show and even on those I was petrified. I didn’t feel like I belonged or was good enough. Did you have all those intrusive thoughts, or did you feel quite confident? 
AM: Before auditioning for BRIT I remember my cousin telling me, “You’re going to be standing in a class, and out of 40 people, two of you are going to make it. You have to look around and think, ‘Me and who else.’ Because if you don’t have that attitude, Archie, you’re never going to do it.” I didn’t believe that inside, but I think there was an exterior shell going into all of these jobs that allowed me to present with confidence no matter how anxious I was. Everyone’s here doing a job and even if it’s your first, you’re still doing the job. I’ve been really lucky to work with some big actors and I’ve never felt that phased. I don’t know why, but I’m glad because I think otherwise it would make the job so hard. There was one job that felt particularly big and I’d been auditioning for it for a while, I’d sent some self-tapes and my agents were pushing for an offer but I said, “I want to do a chemistry test because if I don’t meet the team in person and I don’t know for sure if they want me for this then the anxiety of going through the job just based on the tape is going to kill me.” When you’ve met the team and audition in person, you feel like they know what you can do. When things come through as offers from self-tapes I’m like, “What if I can’t do it?!” [laughs]

JO: That’s a really weird transition in our career. No doubt you’re there now. When I left drama school, you would do auditions in person and I heavily relied on the chat in between doing the scenes. That’s my thing.
AM: Same. Of course, it’s your thing. [laughs]

JO: I was like, “I know the acting was dog shit but just so you know, I’m fun to work with. I’m a right old laugh.” [Archie laughs] I honestly thought I’d get jobs from that. Then that transitioned into taping, which I still hate to this day, and then comes this moment which you’re probably in right now of getting offered stuff. How do you find reading scripts knowing you’ve got the job in the bag, do you find it helpful or unhelpful? 
AM: For me, it’s unhelpful. I think all of these jobs are always a collaboration, you just want to know you’re all on the same page. When I audition for things, if it doesn’t go my way, the peace I make with it is that, whatever idea of the job I had in my mind is not going to be what the job is – so it wasn’t my job. I’m not the right person for it, I just have to let it go. You want to know you’re on the same page as the creative team, all creatives would probably like to see you do something first, but you get into this weird thing of being like, “You can’t make that person audition, you know they can do it.” But I’m sure every director would be like, “Well… I’d like to see them do it a little bit!” I still see actors I love and respect do parts, and you know it was a straight offer because they don’t suit it. It’s always about people, the people you look up to creatively you want to work with. If Steve McQueen offers me something, it doesn’t matter what it is, I’ll say yes. But imagine it’s only later when you’ve done it you look back thinking, “Wish we’d gone through it a little bit before I did it because actually, I don’t know if I was cut out for it.” [both laugh] That’s not me saying, “No one offer me parts.” Please do, but let’s have a conversation about it as well.

JO: You’re right. I’m very dyslexic, if I’m offered something and I read a script I find it very hard to know if I’m the right person to play it. Sometimes I’ll read something and wish I was the right person, but I can’t see myself playing it. I’m getting better at that and I’m sure we all get better at it. The only way to know you can do it in some ways is by doing it.
AM: It’s so weird getting over that  initial anxiety of thinking, “Am I the right person, is this going to work?” Do you feel like you’re over that now?

JO: I’m still as paranoid and insecure as when I first left drama school. I think everyone is, but people show it in different ways. 
AM: I don’t think that ever leaves you.

JO: Probably not. Isn’t there that famous story of Judi Dench where every time she finishes a job she’s like, “That’s my last job, no one’s going to employ me again.” Judi, come on. I’ve seen your career a lot because we’re friends and we’ve worked together, so I feel like I’m pretty well versed, but the recent things I’ve seen you do I feel like I’ve never seen you do before. They’ve been really surprising and exciting roles, working with filmmakers who I think are really exciting. Is there something that would be the dream next thing? 
AM: There are so many filmmakers I want to work with, Steve McQueen, your friend Alice Rohrwacher, I absolutely love. Kantemir Balagov who did that amazing film Beanpole, Joachim Trier who did The Worst Person in the World and Ruben Östlund. There are so many people who would be a dream to work with.

JO: It’s cool that you listed directors who are so exciting but not everyone would know about them. The people you have worked with, like Ari Aster, are really great filmmakers who are pushing the language of cinema in a new direction. What is it about those directors that excites you? 
AM: They’ve all got unique perspectives and views of the world. The great thing about our job is that everything is subjective, you can go and see something everybody loves and absolutely hate it, and that’s fine because that’s the way art works. Sometimes you can’t explain what that feeling is, but that’s the exciting thing, it’s like that feeling when you read a script and you just know you really want to do it.

“What drama school gave me was the confidence to walk into a room with Damien Lewis and Sophie Okonedo and rehearse a play, get it wrong sometimes or make a choice and the choice not be right”

JO: Do you ever think about the fact that people will be at drama school now who see you as an inspiration? 
AM: I’ve been made aware of that a couple of times and I find it quite emotional. It’s quite a weird thing to grapple with, especially – as I’m sure you can relate to – as there are so many days where you feel like you’re wasting your time. I’m a fraud, I’m a laughing stock and a joke. [both laugh] You have these surge moments where all of a sudden you have a few exciting projects on the horizon and more people are talking about you, but I’ve been grafting for over ten years and so it takes a second to get to that place. Sometimes you see your peers doing work you want to be doing but everyone is at different stages. I’m sure it sounds so silly because there are so many young actors who would look at the career I have and think I’m so lucky, which is true. I am very lucky, but I also think it doesn’t invalidate any of those feelings and it also doesn’t mean they’re not real, both things can be true at the same time. In those moments I do step back and think about what an absolute privilege it is to be in the position I’m in, and to be able to inspire young people, because in a grander scheme of things, taking away my narcissistic and egotistical goals of what I want out of my career, inspiring others is the most important thing.

JO: The thing I grapple with a lot is, what are we actually doing? Are we just entertainers? I don’t think we are but if that’s it then what’s the impact? 
AM: If that’s it then what a waste.

JO: Do you ever think, “Fuck, is there something more I could be doing?” 
AM: Of course. You pull back and look at the state of the world and think, “What can I be doing to make it a better place?” It’s hard because I do grapple with the idea that we all have to be politicians or have something to say – it’s difficult. I feel incredibly passionate about this job giving us an unbelievable platform to make the world better and amplify things through the stories we tell. Hopefully, that’s done through our work, but I think what it sometimes does is give people the illusion that we’re supposed to have the correct opinion about everything when we’re also on the journey of learning what’s right or wrong and making up our own mind about things. You can’t have the right answer to every single thing, but with a bit of luck, trying to make the world a better place comes through in our work, the stories we tell, the choices we make, the way they move people and the things they move people to do. If we’re making the right choices, the work will speak for itself.

Saltburn is out in cinemas now. 

Interview originally published in The HERO Winter Annual 2023.