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Possession star Gugu Mbatha-Raw: "I want to be moved and inspired when I see a story"
Actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw tells Radio Times that Possession's pace makes difficult subjects easier to digest.
Sky
- Gareth McLean
Published: Wednesday, 29 July 2026 at 8:00 am
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This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.
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“Entertainment is great and important in itself,” says Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who has appeared in such entertaining fare as Doctor Who, The Cloverfield Paradox and the Marvel TV series Loki. “We all need escapism and there’s a healing for a lot of people to watch a story and be taken away from their own lives.”
But, she says, “Occasionally you get the opportunity to do something that also brings to the fore other issues, or brings things into people’s awareness. I want to be moved and inspired when I see a story. And if it also generates an interesting conversation? That’s the real juicy stuff.”
Mbatha-Raw’s career is punctuated with such “juicy stuff”. There’s Belle, the based-on-a-true-story film which saw her play the illegitimate daughter of a Royal Navy admiral and an enslaved African woman, who was then raised as an aristocrat in 18th-century Britain.
"And there’s also Apple TV’s frothy drama The Morning Show, in which she played a victim of a workplace sexual predator in a MeToo-inspired storyline.
Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Belle. SEAC
“It was a real privilege to work on that powerful story,” she says of playing Hannah, who was coerced into having sex with her boss Mitch Kessler (Steve Carell) and subsequently took her own life. “It was an individual’s perspective on something that was a movement and a cultural conversation and that story cut to the heart of the issue.”
Now to this roster of juicy stuff, we can add Possession, Karla Crome’s new supernatural thriller. Ostensibly about Claudia (Mbatha-Raw), a Bristol solicitor who travels to Jamaica to contest a will and ends up unleashing and then battling an evil spirit from the slavery-era Caribbean, Possession is as much concerned with the legacy of colonialism, the question of reparations and how much of Britain’s contemporary wealth is the result of the transatlantic slave trade.
“I’m not the biggest fan of horror on a personal level, but I love a psychological thriller,” Mbatha-Raw says. “There are scenes that are quite uncomfortable and confronting – it’s about slavery – which is maybe why horror is a good fit for the story, because horror is uncomfortable. There’s a supernatural, thrilling, exciting, propulsive drive to the story and I think that maybe makes some of those more uncomfortable subjects a bit easier to metabolise.”
When telling big stories like this, Mbatha-Raw recalls a conversation she once had with writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood, with whom she worked on Beyond the Lights (2014).
“She always used to say that the story has to be bigger than you. When your talent and your purpose meet, you can achieve great things. I’ve always carried that with me.”
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Possession is on Thursday 6 August at 9pm on Sky Atlantic
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Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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