**CHLOÉ** dress and boots and **ALEXIS KIRK** earrings from Omneque.

The narrative conceit of a character that awakens from a supposed suicide attempt with no memory or sense of their former identity is a fairly delectable proposition for any actor and one that is evidently particularly well suited to Gugu Mbatha-Raw. The actor’s propensity for subtly nerve-shredded existential angst is amply showcased in Surface—the current Apple TV+ show predicated upon precisely the aforementioned proposition.

The increasingly celebrated thespian in Mbatha-Raw is properly in her element in the slow-burning psychological thriller. Surface spins upon the central axis of a woman named Sophie (played by Mbatha-Raw) whose seemingly high-end affluent life in San Francisco turns out to be a scattered jigsaw puzzle of deceit, debt, love triangles, and, perhaps even, murder most foul. It’s hardly surprising, then, that the Oxfordshire-born actor, who first came to the attention of the world for her sterling performance in the game-changing costume drama Belle, and was most recently on our screens as a sinister time-policing bureaucrat in the surreal Disney+ Marvel spin-off, Loki, jumped at the chance to play such an enticing role. “Surface came to me through the Hello Sunshine company, who I worked with on The Morning Show, and I knew if they were doing it, that it would be quality because an ethos of centering strong female roles in the narrative is in their DNA,” says Mbatha-Raw, with infectious enthusiasm down a crackling phone line from Belfast, Ireland, where she is currently holed-up on-set of new project, Lift.

**LOUIS VUITTON** dress and **SWAROVSKI** earrings.

“When I read Veronica West’s pilot script [for Surface], it just really drew me in as a mystery. I thought it was so compelling because it placed you right inside my character’s head—a woman who it seems has a perfect life, before the cracks begin to show,” continues the actor of British and South African parentage, whose eye for a good character is inarguably keen, given she has been awarded an MBE for services to drama. “There is this kind of noir element to the story, and I got drawn into the mystery of this love triangle, but also by the fact that I hadn’t really ever seen a woman in a memory story, you know? We have all seen things like The Bourne Identity, and thrillers that have a man at the center of finding out who they are, or what they have done—but I just thought that this being about a woman was intriguing.”

It’s a salient point that memory loss is a pretty well-trodden trope in the history of cinema, having deep roots in the likes of the classic Hitchcock thriller Spellbound and the truly excellent Memento from Christopher Nolan, but it’s fair to say that it is sadly more than a little unusual for the key protagonist to be female (the incomparable Mulholland Drive being the most obvious exception), and, perhaps just as pertinently, it is not a narrative we have seen packaged into the zeitgeist mold of the mini-series before. “There is something about being able to go into an intimate character-driven story like this that you can’t necessarily get on the big screen, because you get to spend eight hours with all these characters and go to deep psychological depths,” says Mbatha-Raw, when I ask her if she has any concerns about the ubiquitous streaming format in general, given that, well, at least in the opinion of this writer, a good deal of shows can sometimes seem just a little too long, and oftentimes unwieldy. “I think there is a comfort in returning episode after episode to a character, and in getting to really explore the nuances of the story,” she continues. “Also, this is just six episodes, so it feels like a tight package. Hopefully, as a viewer, you are on the edge of your seat, and trying to work out the mystery, but there are also some very interesting questions of trust being raised on the way—you can’t always rely on your senses to give you an accurate picture of the outside world, and thereby your inner world.”

It’s this fluctuation between the inner life of Mbatha-Raw’s character and the way in which she perceives, and is perceived by, a host of supposedly intimate strangers—including her husband—which keeps you guessing exactly what happened to make her supposedly want to check out of the American Dream. “In terms of identity, the notion that Sophie is getting back her life and realizing that everything she knows about herself, she is learning from other people, is really what attracted me,” says the actor, who was so enamored with the role that she also jumped on board as an executive producer. “She is looking outside of herself to find out so many things, and she’s presented with this picture of her life that is flawless, so when she makes the discovery that maybe she can’t trust the story she has been told by her husband, we start to get into the territory of what actually happened on the day that her life changed—whether she jumped at all, or if she was pushed.” Her husband is played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who looks increasingly in need of a valium as the show develops, and it is the scenes between the two of them that really maintain your curiosity—their strange relationship unraveling to the extent that you are eventually not too sure who is manipulating whom. “The story is very much about ‘what would you do if you discovered you were in a world of people who were feeding you a version of your reality,’” explains Mbatha-Raw. “Initially, my character starts in a very fragile place, where she is quite dependent, and she sort of grows from looking outside of herself for versions of who she is, to going deeper into herself to tap into it.”

The inner turmoil that Mbatha-Raw presents behind the eyes in this process, while not overly theatrical, speaks to some degree of training in the art of gravitas, and I ask her if a solid grounding in the likes of Shakespeare via her years at the iconic drama school RADA is something she consciously brings to her roles. “I don’t go into a role thinking, ‘I need to sprinkle some Shakespeare into this,’” she says with the warm, characteristic laugh that explodes out of her sporadically throughout our chat. “But I think, as with any kind of training, the point is that you tend to learn it to forget it—you absorb it, so you can draw upon those muscles if needed. I haven’t done Shakespeare in a couple of years, but I did fairly recently do Nell Gwynn at Shakespeare’s Globe, and even more recently Loki, where you are using this heightened language to talk about other universes, big ideas and concepts that you can’t really do naturalistically.”

**SAINT LAURENT BY ANTHONY VACCARELLO** coat and **MINK JEWELERS** ring.

The aforementioned Loki witnessed Mbatha-Raw work alongside Tom Hiddleston, a fellow student from her time at RADA, and Surface similarly gives her a number of scenes opposite another alum of the school, the wonderful Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays the therapist trying to help her character unpick the real from the unreal—scenes that are obviously relished by Mbatha-Raw, who is not unaware of the responsibility one takes on when tackling a subject like attempted suicide. “It’s certainly a delicate and shocking issue, but I think that there is so much hope in our story,” she says, when I ask if there was any discussion during production that the subject matter might be potentially triggering. “Even though my character has had this very traumatic experience, what we focus on in the story is the mystery of that and the fact that she is trying to unpick her own mind. It’s an empowering journey for her because she grows throughout the season into a powerful woman who is absolutely in charge of her destiny and her life, so even though the show deals with very difficult subject matter initially, it evolves as a thriller that is about finding yourself.”

Empowered women are something of a recurring motif when it comes to Mbatha-Raw’s impressive curriculum-vitae, which begs the question whether she feels there is finally something approaching gender parity in the industry. “It’s hard to gauge whether roles have changed for women in the industry at large, or whether my experience is just me working my way up the industry on a personal level, and getting access to meatier roles,” she says, thoughtfully. “I certainly feel that I have been really fortunate to always be working, and I’m always looking for challenging and complex roles. I do think it’s become more part of the zeitgeist conversation in the last five years or so, but it’s also something I have always sought out,” she pauses for a brief moment, before going on. “I remember having a very specific conversation with a close friend when I was much younger about what I wanted to do with my career, and I remember deciding then that, at its best, I wanted to be able to do work in my career that moved the culture forward, so that to me was always a motivation in terms of doing things that felt refreshing, and explored new perspectives.” She laughs again, seemingly checking herself, before adding, jokingly, “I mean, that was before I figured out there are only something like seven classic storylines in the world! But it then becomes a question of a point of view—whose story are you telling, whose gaze are you featuring the story from? That to me becomes interesting.”

Moving the culture forward also chimes with Mbatha-Raw’s life off-screen, with a role as an ambassador for UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) recently added to her list of considerable achievements, and, in terms of perspective, I can’t help but wonder how witnessing real hardship across the world first-hand has affected her world view, and whether she has hope for the future in these precarious times. “Oh yeah, you have to have hope for the future, don’t you?” she queries, “I think that the work UNHCR is doing is so important. The pandemic curtailed some of the travel I had hoped to do with them, but my first trip to Rwanda was very eye opening in terms of the work they do. When you hear about all these numbers of people that have fled conflict on the news, it can be very hard to feel it on a human level, so part of my role as an ambassador is to witness and observe these individual stories, and try to humanize them for people,” she says, as I offer that we have not yet seen the global political fallout from the mass climate migration we are likely to see over the coming decade. “I mean, it’s a very complex issue, and there are many approaches, but one thing to always bear in mind is to start with the individual, and the fact that these things could happen to you; understanding how related we all are as a human family is a really important place to start—being kind and open-hearted, and putting yourself in the shoes of a refugee, because it could very easily be you one day.”

It’s clear when you speak to Mbatha-Raw that despite winning the genetic lottery and the supposedly glamorous lifestyle one might attribute to a doyenne of the film industry, her core values lie far beyond the realm of Hollywood cliché. “I never really see myself as a celebrity,” she says, when I ask what she thinks of the facile celebrity culture at the beating heart of the entertainment industry. “I see myself as an actor, an artist, and a human being, so I try not to focus too much on that kind of stuff. I don’t know that anyone sets out hand on heart to pursue this for those reasons. I was always driven by adventure and the love of the company of actors, the ping pong of being in a scene and the sense of community, and the many visceral things that happen when you get up in front of people in any kind of space.” Our conversation begins its conclusion, and the actor generously adds, “I think that a sense of adventure is still what drives me, and I think it has also become very much about exploring different sides of myself.”

Finally, I can’t help but wonder, what does someone who has achieved so much consider the greatest achievement of the life they have lived so far? “It’s not to say I don’t reflect, but I don’t really look back like that. I feel I’ve still got a lot of achievements ahead of me,” she shares, and then offers questioningly, “I suppose being able to relax and not get too neurotic about being in the public eye?” I would suggest that perhaps this remark, and its meaningful conclusion, tells you everything you need to know about Gugu Mbatha-Raw: “And feeling like a relatively grounded or stable person, in a relatively ungrounded and unstable world and industry, is quite an achievement?”

Photographed by Jessie Craig
Styled by Harriet Nicolson at Gary Represents
Hair: Shon Hyungsun at The Wall Group
Makeup: Tania Grier using Giorgio Armani makeup and skincare.
Written by John-Paul Pryor