Surface star Gugu Mbatha-Raw on "roller-coaster" role in Apple TV+ thriller

A self-proclaimed “high achiever”, Mbatha-Raw was head girl at her state comprehensive, where she attended drama clubs and was a straight-A student. She was brought up in a small market town near Oxford as an only child by her mother, a nurse, after her parents divorced when she was three years old. Her father was a South African doctor who fled his home country after opposing apartheid.

She won a full scholarship to Rada straight out of school, where her contemporaries included her Loki co-star Tom Hiddleston, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Ben Whishaw. “The journey of life is interesting,” she reflects on her years there. “Some people are not doing it anymore, some people are doing it and having intermittent success, and some people are megastars. And it’s not always the people you think…”

Mbatha-Raw is now 39 and definitely falls into the megastar category. She landed her breakout role in Amma Asante’s period drama Belle in 2013, for which she won several awards, including best actress at the British Independent Film Awards. She now spends a lot of time in Los Angeles, which has proved handy for when she’s cast in films such as Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time or TV dramas like Apple TV+’s The Morning Show.

She was seen last December in the BBC1 series The Girl Before and, having just finished work on Lift, an art heist movie in which she co-stars with Kevin Hart, will soon be returning to London to film the second season of Loki. She barely has time to watch her own shows, while people still often stop her to talk about her heart-warming appearance in San Junipero, one of Black Mirror’s best-loved episodes.

When we meet virtually, Mbatha-Raw is in a New York hotel suite with the net curtains firmly drawn behind her (I know she has an incredible view across Central Park because she posted it on Instagram) and is sitting very straight. She’s notoriously private and self-contained, but she will speak up about gender disparity in film and television if necessary and chooses, where possible, to work alongside other women.

That is what drew her to her latest project, Apple TV+’s new eight-part psychological thriller Surface. “I was intrigued as soon as I saw the name of Reese Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, on the front of the script. I worked with Reese on The Morning Show and I know her ethos is all about empowering women. She’s an actor, producer, business owner and all-round superhero.

“The quality of the writing was amazing and every episode is a roller-coaster, packed with twists and turns. So I came on board as executive producer and we pitched to Apple. I haven’t taken on that role before, but it gives you authorship of a project and I just grew into it as we went along.”

In the drama, she plays Sophie, an English woman married to a rich venture capitalist (played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen) and living in San Francisco, who we meet four months after she jumped – or was pushed – off a ship, suffered a head injury and developed amnesia. Sophie has no idea if she can trust her husband, her friends or even herself.

In preparation for the role, Mbatha-Raw learned how to dive, ride a horse and run up San Francisco’s steep hills (Surface was mostly filmed in Vancouver, although filming moved to San Francisco so they could get shots of the city’s famous streetscapes). She also had to understand more about the condition of amnesia. Surface creator and writer Veronica West brought a memory expert on board who explained how Sophie might experience flashbacks, and Mbatha-Raw had to imagine what it would be like not to know your own secrets.

“Memory loss can be terrifying and Sophie has to rely on other people telling her who she is. But the weight is heavier on the person who does remember – in this case Sophie’s husband. I’ve seen stories about memory in films like The Bourne Identity, but never with somebody who looks like me at their centre.”

We discuss the fact that Surface is shot by two female cinematographers, which is almost unheard of. “It was certainly a new – and very welcome – experience. Film and TV sets are still vastly male-dominated, certainly behind the camera. It’s not a fifty-fifty split by any stretch of the imagination. Having said that, a lot of female directors were unavailable for Surface because they were too busy! But we got to work with Sam Miller, who co-directed I May Destroy You with Michaela Coel and who is an incredible champion of women.”

Mbatha-Raw uses her platform to align herself with movements like Time’s Up and #OscarsSoWhite. Since her father vocally opposed apartheid, is politics in her blood? “Isn’t it in everyone’s blood to a degree? It just made sense to me to speak about those issues since they affect so many of us. I often think of the Desmond Tutu quote, ‘If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.’”

She is clearly keen on quotes since there’s another on her Instagram bio – Polonius’s line in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true”. Mbatha-Raw laughs. “I played Ophelia opposite Jude Law in a 2009 production of Hamlet and it set my life ablaze. It’s the role that brought me to America. It’s the quote I always come back to. There are so many voices in this industry that you have to stay true to your instincts and check in with yourself. It helps ground me and centre me.”
So, basically speaking, no hogwash? “Yes,” she exclaims. “Exactly that!”

The first three episodes of Surface are streaming on Apple TV+ now, with further episodes being released weekly – you can sign up now for Apple TV+.

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