Daniel Kaluuya: ‘I’m trying to stay fearless, but it becomes harder when you’re more visible’

On the set of his new film Queen & Slim, the British actor Daniel Kaluuya realised something about himself. “It’s really difficult to play people that are content,” he explains. “If you look at Get Out, my character was riddled with trauma, guilt and borderline self-hate. In Queen & Slim, Slim is just, ‘I believe in God, I want a family, I don’t think I’m gonna change the world’. There’s less conflict. But, honestly, those people are so valuable. Because that’s the good life. They’re so content and so fulfilled.”

It’s a statement that suggests that, deep down, Kaluuya isn’t. Which feels wrong. He’s one of our most exciting and multifaceted young actors, an Oscar nominee, and is consistently drawn to momentous and galvanising projects such as Widows (2018), Black Panther (2018) and, pre-Hollywood, Black Mirror and Skins. It sounds like he should be content, surely?

“Yeah, but I’m black, bro.”

He erupts in a cackle.

“Now it gets interesting!”

I meet Kaluuya, 30, at the end of a press tour that has been dominated by incendiary headlines related to his ethnicity – “Daniel Kaluuya fled the UK because the colour of his skin was preventing him getting roles”; “Daniel Kaluuya says he is tired of being asked about race”. He’s still processing it all. He says he was texted by a friend the previous night about the most recent headlines, and has faced a day of interviews in which journalists have repeatedly asked him why he won’t talk about race anymore.

“What I’ve said has been reduced to a headline in order to entice people,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean that that’s my perspective. My perspective has been used to spew something. People don’t understand how sensitive this issue is. Like this can cause something, but it don’t really matter to a lot of people.”

“The people that see you more as a person, they’re gonna come to you as a more rounded being and they’re gonna ask it in a much more sensitive and nuanced way,” he continues. “They ain’t gonna reduce it like that, because they care about the impact of it, and the effect of it. A lot of the people I’m talking to aren’t respectful of the issue, which is why they’ll reduce it, and they’ll twist it. Look at the Stormzy thing – boom, and it’s twisted.”

Much like Stormzy, whose quotes about racism existing in the UK were distorted by a baying press and weaponised against him, Kaluuya has become a reluctant poster boy for black Britishness. It understandably becomes wearying to talk about when it’s made the dominant conversation.

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Queen & Slim tangles with blackness, but at its heart is a story of love. Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith are the young couple of the title – an initially mismatched pair who meet on a Tinder date, only for it to spiral out of control when the car they’re in is stopped by a racist cop. An altercation occurs, leaving Queen injured and Slim shooting the cop dead in self-defence. They then go on the run, recognising that they’d never receive a fair trial. As they plot to flee to Cuba, they fall in love with one another, while becoming mythic heroes to black America.

Kaluuya is bewitching, and appears to relish playing a character who is romantic, sexy and at ease in life. His work in the film, however, hasn’t been spoken of as much as his race, and he is visibly frustrated by it. Particularly when he is faced with journalists who have decided to craft a narrative around him before they even meet. He recalls a recent journalist who couched a leading question in a compliment.

“‘You’re in this film Get Out, wicked film, I love that film – let’s talk about how you were rejected from England,’” he sighs. “And that’s what they lead with, that I said I had to leave the UK. That’s what they’re hearing when I talk. People think that it’s me bringing up [race] when people are just asking me about it. The person that’s asking me about it is more obsessed about it than I am, but then I look more like the one who’s obsessed.”

He jumps to his feet in the hotel room he’s been sat in for the day, and walks to a nearby window. He flicks the bottle cap he’s been playing with for much of our conversation out if it.

“I’m the one that’s having the symptoms of it, and the effect of it,” he continues. “Come on, man. It’s a trap, bro.” He returns to the sofa, and clarifies himself. “It’s not even like it’s a trap, it’s just – it’s odd. It’s very odd. And that’s all I was saying – it’s just tiring. Because it is tiring! And more tiring because I know I’ll say it and then it gets put in someone’s hands and they’ll just run with it. A lot of people are educated above their intellect, or educated above what they’ve seen in the world, so they don’t know. There are certain issues that you can’t misquote.”

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Even removed from the press cycle, Kaluuya emits a discomfort that seems related to his present circumstances. It brings to mind that there are two kinds of famous people: those who take to it as if it were their calling, flourishing amid the attention, and others floored by how unusual their lives have become. The latter tend to be like Kaluuya: working class, deeply empathetic, and told in their most impressionable years that great success would never happen to them.

Kaluuya leans across the table separating us, and fixes his eyes on me. His eyes are captivating things, utilised to their fullest by the filmmakers he works with. In Queen & Slim they convey sass and flirtation, in Widows they were piercing tools of intimidation, and their teary, terrified stare in Get Out was so effective that his eyes made up the entirety of the film’s poster.

“The thing is: look at me,” he begins, stroking his sleeve. “I love this coat, I’m having the career of my dreams. My life’s sick! Last night I was surrounded by people that I love. Yet there’s still something.” He enthusiastically rubs his hands together, as if imitating a villain, or someone with ulterior motives. “Like you reach your goals, but there seems to be a narrative. It’s not the reality. I have to be aware that it’s not about me, it’s about how people see me. It affects me, but it’s not from me. Yet even though it’s not from me, I’m still questioned about it.

“I know that I’ve been working my ass off all of my life to get in the position I’m in,” he continues. “I’m very blessed to be in the position I’m in. I’m very blessed to have the opportunities I have. And I prefer my narrative of myself than anyone else’s narrative who doesn’t understand me, of me. People need to know that. That’s them. They need to not look like it’s them for it to feel real and for it to spread. So it is what it is.”

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When Kaluuya was 16 and growing up in Camden Town, London, he told his mum that he wanted to be an actor. “She was all stressed and that,” he remembers with a laugh, so she took him to Connexions. “It was basically youth advice. So we sat down with this woman in Connexions who told me, ‘Acting is not gonna work out’. Could you imagine if I listened to her?”

As worried as his mother was, Kaluuya quickly embodied a drive and determination that would put many teenagers to shame. Amid drama workshops and plays at the Anna Scher Theatre, he found work as a runner on a shopping channel at 16 and began writing and performing at a local theatre company. It was there that he was swooped up by Company Pictures, who were looking for young writers to advise on scripts for a forthcoming Channel 4 teen drama they were producing.

The series was called Skins, and Kaluuya contributed to its scripts in the first series. At the same time, he attended an open casting call for a mystery project that coincidentally turned out to be Skins, too – he would subsequently portray Posh Kenneth, a hip-hop fan with a plummy accent who recurred through the show’s first two series. By night, Kaluuya would work behind the scenes on the show, eventually scripting two episodes himself. The show would become a wellspring of young British talent: Nicholas Hoult, Dev Patel, Hannah Murray, Kaya Scodelario, Jack Thorne and Josie Long all came up through the school of Skins.

“I was still in education, I was still getting EMA [education maintenance allowance],” he remembers. “I was figuring s*** out. But I was just like, ‘Yo, this s***’s fun’. I loved being around creative people. It was a great space to be in. I hosted the Skins podcast, and I wrote their MySpace pages. It was like this thing that allowed me to stretch all these muscles that I didn’t even realise I had. I was like, ‘Ooh, let me try this, let me try that.’ Looking back, it was really enriching.”

He remembers with fondness his time in Bristol, the city in which Skins was filmed. “It’s a beautiful city to walk in,” he says. “I’d already had holidays, because my mum made sure we went on holidays growing up, but it was weird to have my worldview changed by just going to a different part of your own country. Camden is kind of like a village, and so inward. Bristol gave me an exposure to things. It’s like what I presume people who go to uni feel – I didn’t go. So it shifted something in me.”

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He describes himself back then as “fearless”. “I didn’t give a s***! I could do anything, and I didn’t even have to say that out loud – I just did it, you know what I’m saying?”

He also says that he’s trying to keep that spirit intact. “I know where I want to head, I know that I can get an idea and I go for it,” he explains. “I’m trying to keep that fearlessness, but what happens is when you’re more visible, that becomes harder. There are just more voices. I feel like you grow up and people try and project their own insecurities and fears onto you, to dull that sense that’s just in you when you’re a young person. Like, ‘You can’t play this, you can’t do that’ – it’s the antithesis of creativity.”

From Skins came appearances in Johnny English Reborn (2011), Sicario (2015) and Psychoville, as well as the starring role in Roy Williams’ acclaimed play Sucker Punch. It was his presence in the second episode of Black Mirror, playing a young man trapped in an enclosed space and generating power in exchange for money, that caught the attention of filmmaker Jordan Peele. He was subsequently cast in Peele’s Get Out, which scored him an Oscar nomination in 2018.

Today, Kaluuya is a major industry player – his production company 59% signed a deal with Paramount Pictures last year, and he’s just finished filming the starring role in a Warner Bros biopic about the murdered Black Panther Fred Hampton. The film also reunites him with his Get Out co-star Lakeith Stanfield. “We’re on the same journey,” Kaluuya explains, “so it’s pure pleasure to connect with him.”

For his next project, he’s looking for what he describes as something with “vibes”. He wants to do a romantic comedy, and discover roles that continue to challenge him.

“I think your life is a true art piece,” he explains. “When you look back at your life, and you’re about to bounce – say I’m in a hospital bed, say I get hit by a train, you just look back and go, ‘You know what, I liked that piece and what I created there’, or ‘I like who I touched there, and I like who touched me’. And then you just keep on pushing.”

Queen & Slim is in cinemas now