Paapa Essiedu Is A Classically Trained Charmer

Offering to carry a stranger’s urine sample is not the stuff of your typical meet-cute, but Paapa Essiedu makes the gesture seem wholesome, maybe even a little sensual. That act of service kicks off The Effect, the buzzy off-Broadway drama that starred Essiedu and A24 darling Taylor Russell as participants in a psychiatric drug trial who fall in love and question if their feelings are real or just chemicals — and if there’s even a difference.

Spend some time with Essiedu in person, though, and it’s clear he could charm anyone into handing over their specimen. As we settle in for a late lunch in Manhattan, he chooses to sit next to me in our booth, instead of across the table, because of concerns about my recording. He calls our server, Sapphire, by her first name every chance he gets, delighting in the sound of it: Sapphire! Saaaphire! After ordering a plate of rotisserie chicken, he tells me, “I hate eating in front of people, so this is an act of love.” He knows how to quickly dial up the intimacy of an encounter.

Essiedu, who broke out on screen in Michaela Coel’s HBO series I May Destroy You, is days from wrapping up The Effect’s New York run when we meet. Reflecting on the role, he says his playful conversation style is one of the ways he related to his character in the play, Tristan. “He’s all about the here and now, cracking jokes, and dancing. But all of that is really a means of not going deeper.”

The 33-year-old actor, though, is happy to go deeper. He tells me that he started going to therapy about eight years ago, five years after losing his mother to breast cancer and about a decade after his father died. “I’d had some really hard times,” he says. As essential as therapy has been in his own life, he’s quick to laugh about how men brag about it on dating apps. “In this time, we’re really like, ‘Hey, you got to do therapy, and if you don’t do therapy, you’re a f*cking philistine.’ ... It’s becoming a badge of honor in a way that it kind of takes away from [the work].”

His advice to women who encounter those types? “Swipe left.”

Growing up, Essiedu says, his mother used to plead with him: Get a real job. It was just the two of them in the London suburb of Walthamstow, which Essiedu describes as “a f*cked up place to be” in the ’90s. “People were getting snatched up by the police,” he says. “You didn’t know how your son was going to turn out in a very real way.” Essiedu had every intention of heeding his mother’s advice until he met a girl who went into the National Youth Theatre and followed her there. “I have no idea where she is now, but God bless her soul,” he says. (He ended up marrying another actor, Rosa Robson.)

The art world couldn’t have been more foreign to him. “I had no reason to think that Will Smith was a real person who had a job and a car,” he says. But within a few short years of drama school, he was getting national attention. As a member of the famed Royal Shakespeare Company, he made headlines for becoming the first Black actor to play Hamlet in the group’s productions and later received the prestigious Ian Charleson Awards’ first prize for his work with the company. (Past recipients include Ruth Negga, Cush Jumbo, and David Oyelowo.)

Eventually, however, the loss of his mother caught up to him. “I was doing these things that I was really proud of in my professional life but I was like, ‘Who’s this for? Does it f*cking matter?’” he says. “I remember I was playing Romeo on my 25th birthday and I was just in floods of tears the whole day. I was like, ‘I need to act on this, otherwise it’s going to continue having a destructive impact on my life.’”

“The way grief works is kind of ‘quantum,’” he explains. “You both feel everything and nothing at the same time. And if you don’t have the accessibility or the availability to delve into that, you shouldn’t force yourself to do it, because you’re teetering on a knife edge.”

That knowledge found a natural home in his drama school classmate Coel’s auto-fictional, impressionistic I May Destroy You. In the series, Coel plays Arabella, a woman grappling with PTSD following a sexual assault at a nightclub; Essiedu plays her freewheeling best friend, Kwame, who experiences an assault himself during a Grindr hookup and homophobic dismissal from police when he attempts to report it. Essiedu’s layered performance turned what in lesser hands could have been a sidekick into its own gravitational force (and earned him an Emmy nomination). “I didn’t want [Kwame] to be a portrayal of someone’s pain or trauma just in isolation,” Essiedu says. “Because it never happens in isolation: Even in those horrific moments, there’s always funny sh*t that happens.”

Essiedu’s ability to find the light in the darkness comes up over and over again in conversations about him with his co-workers. “He can do a combination of breaking your heart and making you laugh,” says The Effect playwright Lucy Prebble, who was a writer and executive producer on Succession. Jessie Buckley, who starred opposite Essiedu in Men, calls him “funny and naughty,” but “with an ocean underneath.” “The film [we worked on] is intense, but I can’t remember a time I corpsed” — British-Irish for breaking character and laughing — “more on a set,” Buckley says.

“He’s just a very gregarious guy who can dick around, chat about Love Island, but also has an obvious, searing intelligence,” adds Joe Barton, who created the two-season British sci-fi series The Lazarus Project, in which Essiedu starred.

The other thing Essiedu’s colleagues want me to understand is that, despite his affinity for dark, psychological projects, the actor is not looking for healing in a part. “We both lost parents at young and impressionable ages,” says The Walking Dead star Lennie James, who met Essiedu through BAFTA’s mentorship program, then played his father in the two-hander drama A Number. “But Paapa’s very clear that despite the echoes in A Number, he’s a bit like me, he doesn’t see his work as therapy. If there’s something there that is of use to the play, then that’s a good thing, but if it’s not there, it’s of no use to us really.”

Barton calls him “a Swiss Army knife of an actor who takes his craft very seriously, but [without] those layers of pretension.” Prebble also praises Essiedu’s classical, technical abilities like breath work and body control: “It can sound boring, but on stage it’s everything.”

Essiedu tells me he was eager to use those techniques to explore the physical aspects of new romance in The Effect. “Whenever we relay stories about how we fell in love,” he explains, “we always say, ‘Oh, they said so-and-so’ but it’s like, ‘How did your hand move? What was the electricity when you came really close together, and then you didn’t quite have the courage to kiss each other?’”

Next up, Essiedu will star opposite Saoirse Ronan in the indie drama The Outrun, and he’s in pre-production on a horror comedy called The Scurry. Prebble foresees him having a career like Succession breakout star Matthew Macfadyen: “Nobody really expected or knew that Matthew would be able to do one of the defining screen roles in Tom Wambsgans. I have a suspicion that Paapa is capable of doing the same, and I have a hankering to see him do villainy.”

Essiedu considers Cillian Murphy a career role model. “People are going to think I’m just saying that now because he’s just won the Oscar [for Oppenheimer], but the guy has been so f*cking good for so f*cking long and no one knew who the f*ck he was,” he says. “He just lived in this village and took his kids to school.”

Easier said than done. Essiedu says he has to “be brave,” in terms of the projects he chooses. It takes courage to wait for that next idiosyncratic indie or singular limited series — especially as the more lucrative, less intellectually challenging opportunities pass by. “We’re in the streets out here,” he jokes. “And even me who’s doing relatively really well, I still need to pay the gas bill and sh*t like that!”

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