On Monday some of Britain’s best black actors walked the red carpet for the fifth annual Screen Nation awards. Founded by Ghanaian producer Charles Thompson in 2002, the so-called ‘black Baftas” is the one time of year when such black talent gathers under one roof to celebrate its success. And yet, unlike other awards in Britain, Screen Nation seldom gets a mention in the press. Few people even know it exists.
Does that really matter, I have been asked. After all, black Britons such as Thandie Newton and Chiwetel Ejiofor have such high profiles internationally that no one can have any doubt about the strength of the United Kingdom’s home-grown talent.
Yes, it does matter. Back in Britain, TV and film producers and directors are still nervous about black actors in leading roles. Ask anyone on the street to name five American black actors and they can do it; but ask them to name five British counterparts and they will be stuck. That is not because the talent does not exist, but because we just don’t get that exposure here.
It is only when they go to the United States that actors such as Newton and Ejiofor get the parts, and therefore the acclaim, they deserve. Whether it is Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Vivian Johnson in Without a Trace, Lennie James in Jericho or Idris Elba as Russell ‘Stringer” Bell in The Wire, black Britons seem to get better parts over there, even on the small screen.
Americans simply seem to be more comfortable with black actors in leading roles, and with the whole concept of ‘generic” parts in which race is not an issue. Dennis Haysbert and Morgan Freeman have both played the American president, while Haysbert is now the leader of a special operations unit in the new David Mamet drama The Unit. In Ugly Betty, Vanessa Williams is getting rave reviews as a scheming magazine executive.
I have been fortunate in my career in Britain, in that I have managed to play plenty of parts that were not conceived specifically for a black actor. I am not entirely alone in this, but many of my peers have struggled in this respect. To get roles with authority and weight still seems to be extremely difficult. All too often, black actors are only seen fit to be secondary characters: ‘the best friend”, say, or ‘the good cop”. I think I have played more black policemen than there are black policemen. And these are not the kind of roles that get you noticed.
By contrast, when I was in the US last year for the premiere of Blood Diamond, I was amazed at the variety and scope of some of the castings I was going into. Casting directors told me openly that no new American TV series gets the green light without at least two or three leading ethnic minority roles. If nothing else, in that melting pot of a country it makes business sense to have a cast in which the audience can recognise itself.
That might also be true of multicultural Britain, of course. Lots of black people are suddenly watching formula one motor racing because of Lewis Hamilton; if film and television executives were braver in their casting, perhaps they would bring a new audience to their programmes.
Maybe I am hoping for too much, but I have always felt that television and film have a responsibility to be diverse, uplifting and inclusive. At times it feels as though the British film industry is at least 10 years behind the US’s.
Without events such as Screen Nation, much of the work done by black British people in film and television would go unnoticed. Do awards like these ghettoise black actors, or somehow relegate them? Of course not. I won a prize on Monday evening and accepted it with just as much pride as if I had been given a Bafta or an Oscar. —