The hope is to give them a completely different relationship with it. “Shakespeare is held up as the pinnacle of English literature but it can feel so alienating and distant to people. “Theatre is massively important to me,” says Enoch, a patron of the cultural education charity Coram Shakespeare Schools Foundation, which provides resources and support to schools to put on their own Shakespeare plays in professional theatres. Why shouldn’t everyone have the opportunity to follow a career in this industry?”Įnoch is currently playing Romeo at the Globe opposite Rebekah Murrell amid post-pandemic fears that the arts, and West End theatre especially, are regressing into an elite pastime. “Part of growing up is you realise: ‘My experience isn’t everyone’s, and actually I’ve had it really good. Now that kind of amazes me.”ĭespite, or perhaps because of his Westminster and Oxbridge education, he is sympathetic to calls for acting to become more socially diverse, too. I was busy playing football or whatever I was doing at uni. I was a student at the time and I didn’t go. I remember, for example, there was a tuition fee march in London. “If you’re comfortable, everything’s good right? But also I came out of the boom Blair years and frankly, me and a lot of my friends weren’t very political. “That’s also slightly the product of my privilege,” he quickly adds. I wouldn’t be comfortable persisting in that kind of blissful ignorance any more. “I gained a different perspective, which informed the way I view myself coming back to the UK. “Going to the states removed me from a context where I had that sense of belonging,” he says. We were all sitting around in Philadelphia shooting the pilot and I was like, ‘Goodness, what if this happens?’ And a couple of the other actors were like, ‘Viola Davis is playing the lead, it’s a Shonda Rhimes show, obviously we’re getting picked up.’” “I turned up in the States with no real idea of what I was dealing with. “I would love it if the prominent train of thought wasn’t, ‘To get work as a black actor, you just have to learn an American accent and be in a civil rights movie.’ We have stories to tell here in Britain – and with shows like Small Axe, it seems as if they’re starting to get told.”īeing cast as Wes Gibbins in How to Get Away with Murder “changed my life”, says Enoch. He has spent most of the pandemic living in London with his girlfriend, but his career frequently takes him to the US and his highest profile roles post-Potter, including Raych in Foundation, have been American-accented. I love talking to other actors about how they got into it and I’m aware that not everyone had such a clear path.” Being an actor, he says, “always felt possible … I felt I had the permission to have that goal. I stood among the groundlings at the Globe, watching my dad play the King of France in Henry V with Mark Rylance as Henry.” Enoch acknowledges that growing up with a father on stage placed him in a privileged position. “I would watch films he’d done,” he says – Russell had supporting roles in spy thriller The Man Who Never Was and the Steve McQueen classic The Great Escape – “and he was in the first play I remember seeing. For as long as he can remember, he wanted to be an actor too. Photograph: Mitch Haaseth/ABC via Getty ImagesĮnoch’s actor father, William Russell, was 64 when he was born. ‘Being cast as Wes changed my life’ … as Wes Gibbins in How to Get Away With Murder. “It was great to see his ability to realise a character when you’re in fantastic locations and on massive sets. “He’s brilliant, and the stuff between Raych and Hari is very meaty,” says Enoch. He’s done immensely well to fashion it into something with narrative coherence that still has that epic scale.”Įnoch plays Seldon’s adopted son and aide-de-camp, meaning he got to do plenty of work opposite Harris who, as in Chernobyl, adeptly plays the man who knows too much. “And that’s one of the challenges with it, there’s so much material. “David Goyer described it as a chess game played over thousands of years,” says Enoch. The series sees a band of exiles led by genius mathematician Hari Seldon, played by Jared Harris, attempt to preserve civilisation amid the decline of the 12,000-year-old Galactic Empire. Photograph: AlamyĬreated by David S Goyer (writer of the Blade and Dark Knight film trilogies) and based on the novels by Isaac Asimov, Foundation is a big-budget sci-fi epic. ‘I couldn’t think of any black characters’ … Enoch, second left, as Dean Thomas in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
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