Actor Temi Wilkey: ‘No one saw me as a Blanche DuBois or a Juliet'

The Guardian

21-02-2025

The seed of actor and writer Temi Wilkey's new one-woman show was planted when she saw a photo of herself dancing at an east London party. As she recreates it for me, she throws her arm up and adopts a model-esque expression, personifying, as a friend described it, 'main character energy'. 'I felt very empowered by her saying that, like: Is this how people could see me? Is this who I actually am?'
Main Character Energy became her show's title, long before it was written. 'Not to compare myself to Charli xcx,' she laughs, 'but it makes me think about Brat, because she didn't write any of the music until she'd come up with a name. It was a guiding principle, like: is that brat?'
Wilkey is channelling main character energy when we meet, sweeping through Soho theatre in a floor-length furry coat and animal-print hat, telling me about a recent tarot reading that predicted an incredibly busy, but very fulfilling 2025. To Wilkey, the phrase at the centre of her show 'means believing that you're worthy to be seen and celebrated. It means that your story is important. Main characters are allowed to be flawed and messy.' It's something, she says, that hasn't always been afforded to Black women and something she struggled to feel in years past.
The title became 'a north star' as she decided where to put her creative energy. She realised: 'No one's going to put me in the limelight. You have to do it yourself. In some ways it's annoying, but in others, it's empowering.' The resulting show is effervescent, blending cabaret, comedy and theatre, and dissecting both the tropes of a one-woman show and the insidious reaches of racism. In it, Wilkey plays a version of herself, one who is super-serious about acting, determined to show us that she's a star, but doesn't realise she's starring in a comedy.
'I was really interested to explore self-indulgence, what it means to play yourself,' she says. 'I've always been obsessed with self-portraiture, what an artist presents of themselves and what that says about them.'
She had already built an eclectic CV – she'd trained with the National Youth Theatre repertory company, co-founded drag king company Pecs in 2013, won the Stage Debut award for best writer in 2020 with her first play The High Table, and had written for the screen, including an acclaimed episode of Sex Education. Yet while writing opportunities rolled in, acting work didn't. Even when she wrote a TV part she knew she'd be perfect for, when she auditioned, she never heard back: 'I only found out when I visited the set and saw someone else's picture on the wall.' It was demoralising, and started to percolate with past experiences.
Wilkey was a shy but imaginative child. She grew up in north London, the eldest daughter to two British-Nigerian doctors who valued academic excellence and sent little Temi to a theatre group 'to come out of my shell'. It worked, she 'flourished', and even picked up jobs on TV shows, including as an EastEnders extra. 'I love it when people are looking at me, I love surrendering to a moment and sharing something with people,' Wilkey says. 'I secretly harboured the dream to act.'
She found an outlet in religion, too, especially as a teenager. 'I grew up in a Pentecostal church: speaking in tongues and fainting, there's so much theatricality to that, which I think I loved. I led worship once – it was incredible having a captive audience.'
Wilkey stopped being religious 'very sharply' during her first year of university in what felt like 'a big existential breakdown' but also helped her realise she was queer. She still harbours curiosity about higher powers, exploring 'pre-colonial spirituality' in The High Table, where her character's ancestors decide whether to bless her marriage to a woman, and gravitating towards tarot and astrology as ways to contemplate big questions.
When Wilkey went to study English literature at the University of Cambridge, she got involved with student theatre, joining a production of Macbeth at the Edinburgh festival fringe (she cringes after realising she's said the play's name inside Soho theatre). Even though she had a tiny part, was sharing a flat with too many people, and flyering daily in the rain, she thought: 'I have to pursue this, regardless of the circumstances, I'm so happy.'
Wilkey had been to private school and was from a middle-class family but, as a young Black woman without pre-existing connections there, felt the layers of exclusivity at Cambridge. She thought talent would be spotted and rewarded with roles, but says the students calling the shots 'didn't see me as Blanche DuBois or Juliet, or even a supporting part. I was a servant or an ensemble character.' Later, the same was true at the National Youth Theatre: 'I was cast as a doctor in every single thing, just these tiny, tiny parts.'
She had seen people create shows for themselves and, thinking it wasn't for people like her, almost resented it. 'I hadn't seen a Black woman do that,' she says. As she started creating Main Character Energy, which premiered at Edinburgh last summer, her perspective shifted. 'I was like: what does it mean to be unapologetically taking up space as a Black woman?'
She wanted the show to be funny and so began doing spots at comedy nights. She'd dabbled in comedy at university as part of all-woman sketch group Rookie and found it 'fulfilling … thrilling and live' but also egalitarian, the funniest ideas winning out. When Rookie came to a sudden end, it felt as fi comedy was yet another role that wasn't meant for her, and it took Wilkey a long time to acknowledge the chasm that left. She realised during the pandemic, while watching comedies such as The Good Place and People Just Do Nothing, how much she missed writing and performing comedy.
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Returning to it, 'I was saying I was just doing it to get better at writing jokes, but I had quiet dreams and ambitions.' She is inspired by comedian friends Sophie Duker and Kemah Bob, is dabbling with improv and burlesque, and has been enraptured by clowning while watching acts such as Julia Masli. She feels like 'a little sideways crab', approaching comedy from an odd direction, but increasingly excited about folding it into her work.
Standup also helped her find the fictional Temi, whom Wilkey describes as 'the most camp version of myself'. In Main Character Energy, her time as drag alter ego Drag King Cole ('He was a bit of a crooner but would also rap and dance') is evident, too, as she dances, sings, lip-syncs and plays with the audience. The show is performed in the round which, as her director Ragevan Vasan noted, makes Wilkey the centre of attention. She's thrilled by shows where the audience 'have no idea what's going to happen', where 'the boundaries are elastic'.
The show is sexy and silly, but doesn't shy away from darkness. While Wilkey was writing the show, Black British actor Francesca Amewudah-Rivers was in the West End playing Juliet, and facing a disturbing racist backlash. 'Juliet is a part I've always wanted to play,' says Wilkey. 'There's this beautiful line: 'My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep,' this feeling of a huge uncontainable emotion that I really relate to.'
Wilkey turns that urge into a dark joke: despite the torrent of racism, her character covets the role. 'It's the psychosis of racism, the monster it makes of you,' she says. 'Here, in this country, it's worse to be called a racist than to be racist, which is incredibly smart, because it means you can never call it out. It's like Schrödinger's racism.' Instead, she decided to show its effects in the show, where a hard-working, ambitious, highly educated Black woman tries over and over to fit in but is consistently overlooked. The conclusion is clear: it's not a level playing field. 'You can say that racism doesn't exist, but I'm here telling you how I experienced it.'
Main Character Energy has drawn together the threads of Wilkey's past endeavours. She feels focused on building work that is 'queer in content … and in form' and is channelling that into new screen and stage projects. She laments the loss of many theatre scratch nights, those spaces for performers to experiment, and dreams of setting up an artist-development programme, a place where people can 'demystify' the industry for one another.
'I'm powered by joy, connection,' she says. 'Before I started writing the show, I knew I wanted people to feel empowered, like they had permission to be their fullest, most authentic selves. Everyone wants main character energy: come and get it!'
Main Character Energy is at Soho theatre, London, 25 February to 15 March.