Ellis star Sharon D Clarke: "Seeing a big woman on television making love… is still something you don’t often see"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Sharon D Clarke has made history with the roles she’s played. As Grace O’Brien, she was one of three very diverse women to step into the Doctor Who universe in 2018, alongside Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor and Mandip Gill’s companion Yaz. “What, young boys can’t look up to a woman?” she says now of the claims a female Doctor deprived young boys of a positive male role model.

She then starred in a story that hadn’t been told on screen before with 2024’s Mr Loverman, based on Bernardine Evaristo’s novel. She played the wife of a secretly gay man (Lennie James) who’s in love with his best friend. It was only in 2022 that homosexuality was decriminalised in Antigua and Barbuda, where part of Mr Loverman was set. “It’s really, really important these stories are told.”

She also reflects proudly on her sex scenes in the series. “Seeing a big woman on television making love – or being loved – is still something you don’t often see. I’m there with all my flesh and my red sequinned thing with my t*ts out!” she remembers.

Now Clarke returns as the first Black female lead detective in a British TV series for season 2 of Ellis. In one scene, a character who’s part of an investigation expects DCI Ellis to be a man, and when she shows up, tries to belittle her. “It’s dealing with that kind of behaviour, which sometimes is overt in life, but usually it’s subtle. I’m glad we don’t beat anybody over the head with it. When you show them what the small microaggressions are, they have to think again and look deeper.”

In the moment, have all these parts felt significant? “Every last one,” says the 59-year-old from Enfield, north London. “It’s never lost on me that, at this stage, I’m able to do work that really holds up a mirror to society.”

The three-time Olivier Award winner admits she’s “happiest on stage”, and has spoken about how she stopped auditioning for TV roles because she was only being cast as nurses, but that changed when she was offered the role of consultant Lola Griffin in Holby City in 2008. “Lola was a young version of my mum – this strong Black woman who didn’t apologise for who she was, for her size, for any of it. I went, ‘That’s what your mother’s been trying to teach you. Get on board.’ This part of my mum [who passed away in 2016] that I’d run away from just became a part of me. Lola gave me that.”

Clarke’s wife, writer and director Susie McKenna (the couple married in 2008), said it was hard when Clarke was playing Lola. “She saw this strength coming through,” the actor recalls, “like, ‘She’s gone a bit too far, she needs to come back to the middle.’” But when she was young, Clarke backed away from confrontation. “I’d think, ‘OK, let me not say that. I don’t want to upset so-and-so.’ Now, I’m not afraid to say what I think. That’s part of being [nearly] 60 and coming into your own, and it’s so liberating. Characters along the way have shown me those parts of myself that I’m able to unleash.”

Unlike when men speak their mind and are called confident, when women say what they feel with conviction… “You’re intimidating,” Clarke chimes in. “Like what, really? Just because you’re strong! This is me being gorgeous, baby! You get a lot of that, especially as a Black woman. It’s: ‘angry Black woman’. It’s like, now you’re making me angry. I was cool before, but now you’re getting my hackles up.”

Even in her smaller roles, Clarke makes a big impact. She voiced Dulcibear, Elphaba’s (Cynthia Erivo) caring childhood nanny, in Wicked and Wicked: For Good, a part that doesn’t exist in the stage musical. “I didn’t really tell anybody about it. I was a very subsidiary character. My niece sent me a text going, ‘OMG, Auntie Sharon, are you in Wicked? You didn’t tell me you were in Wicked!’”

People have credited Dulcibear’s inclusion as key to understanding Elphaba’s backstory. “It’s incredible that this little character has gotten into people’s hearts,” Clarke says. “It makes me really proud to be part of that Wicked legacy. It has fulfilled one of my ambitions of voicing a character. I’d love to do a big animated movie.”

She’s proud of each and every role. “I’m loving the work I’m doing at the moment. Rather than going, ‘Oh my God, we need to pay the mortgage, let’s get some money in this house now,’ I’m doing stuff because I want to do it and be part of telling that story.”

Ellis season 2 will air on Tuesday 10 March and Wednesday 11 March at 9pm on 5.

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