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spotting an advertisement in the local paper. He got in. “I think I just got lucky,” he says. “But my mum
really pushed me. I worked really hard from an early age.”

At school, there was quite a big Asian population, “but not many who looked like me,” he says. “I grew up in
a single-parent, low-income family and I saw very different lives – kids who had PlayStations and would go
on holiday to Center Parcs, which seemed the fanciest thing in the world.” He did well enough academically
to be offered a place to read medicine at University College London, before deciding to throw it up for
drama college on the buzz of a single school performance as a postman in Me and My Girl.

While his main home was London, he kept up a relationship with his family in Ghana, where he has an
older half-brother and sister. In I May Destroy You there’s a moment when a chat-up alights on the “Where
are you from?” question. “It depends who’s asking,” says Kwame’s date. “If it’s a black person, I’m from
Nigeria. If they’re English, they’re getting Barking and Dagenham.” Being part of the diaspora, says Essiedu,
“I identify as being Ghanaian and British equally enough. I grew up in London but that culture is in my
blood.”

One result of this mixed background is an ability to code-switch between different linguistic cultures, which
electrified his Hamlet, creating a prince who is also a rude boy. He recently reprised one of the play’s key
speeches for The Monologue Library – a lockdown archive of recordings by leading actors to console bereft
theatregoers. His voice sits in the library alongside more than 100 others, including those of fellow
Shakespeareans Simon Russell-Beale, Derek Jacobi, and his Gangs of London co-star Sope Dirisu.

'Trigonometry shows that polyamory is about love': Paapa
Essiedu's lockdown TV

Does the success of actors such as Essiedu and Dirisu reflect a society that is finally accepting the
responsibility to represent its own diversity? “I think it’s complex,” he says cautiously. “For example,
with Gangs it’s great and important that there’s a central family who aren’t defined by their blackness, who
are comfortable in their own skins and their own race. It’s also great to have Michaela, a young woman of
colour, present at every level of a BBC/HBO series that will be shown on BBC One.

“But it’s all very well having a couple of people playing good parts in a couple of series or films. The
question is: is that reflected in the other departments – in makeup, in lighting, in producing? It’s a good
way to be walking, but we still have many, many steps ahead of us.”

I May Destroy You starts on BBC One on Monday 8 June