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having to keep answering the same questions again and again. “Well, I appreciate you

acknowledging that, what it’s like to be on the other side of that.”

He says of the experience: “It was really hard at the time. I was 25, you know, and those were

the first proper interviews I was doing. It was the first major role I was playing. There were so

many other things to stress about. So, yeah, it was kind of disappointing to have to navigate the

monotony and the lack of expansiveness of the press.”

The role itself was also a strain. Hamlet, after all, is haunted by the ghost of his late father. And

Essiedu was twice bereaved himself: his father when he was 14, his mother when he was 20.
“Pretty much all roles you have to draw from experience, but Hamlet is such an elusive

character. His struggles, especially the kind of trauma around his grief and his desire for

rescuing and fixing and all that, they really play into a lot of my own insecurities and

experiences. And I suppose because of the scrutiny on me also . . . You can’t phone it in.”

Which roles has he phoned in? “No, no, none! But I mean . . . It forces you to engage with huge

ideas about yourself. It was a long, long job and so it was difficult. It is difficult to think about

people you have lost, about death, about your own mortality. It teaches you a lot about how to
care for yourself as an actor and not just turn your body into a vessel for someone else’s

pleasure.”

Essiedu is an incredible actor. His Hamlet was a performance of extraordinary conviction and

charisma. And the work he has gone on to has been of a consistently high standard. He excelled

as the African preacher who tries to be more English than his colonial rulers in Danai

Gurira’s The Convert at the Young Vic. He was on “dazzling form”, Ann Treneman suggested

in her Times review of Pinter One for the director Jamie Lloyd in the West End. He was equally
assured as a young journalist in Bartlett’s newspapers series Press on BBC One and as a father

accused of killing his child in Thorne’s Kiri on Channel 4. Yet, as someone who wants so much

to throw all of himself into his work, who wants his work to matter, he has had to get better at

switching off.

That’s the hope, anyway. Nothing wild, he says; just do yoga, perhaps go for a drink after a

show, play or watch some football, spend some time with his girlfriend — about whom he

prefers not to say anything, except that they don’t share his home in Battersea, southwest

London. We meet during rehearsals for Pass Over and he’s struggling to sleep.