Freema Agyeman: ‘Why remove the uncomfortable bits from Shakespeare?'

Telegraph

20-04-2025

When Freema Agyeman was just starting out, an ingénue actress on ITV's 2001-03 revival of Crossroads, she was surprised to find herself nominated for Sexiest Female at the 2003 British Soap Awards. The award may sound like a throwback to the era of Bernard Manning, but it would remain a category at ITV's annual ceremony until 2014. 'Can you imagine being nominated for something like that today?' Freeman asks, almost lost for words. 'Can you imagine? It wasn't even that long ago. So, to some extent, I guess we've come a long way.'
The trophy did not go home with Agyeman that night. Instead, more than 20 years later, her mantelpiece bears something much happier: a Best Supporting Performer gong from the WhatsOnStage Awards, won in February for her turn as Jul­iet's fusspot nurse in Jamie Lloyd's West End revival of Romeo and Jul­iet. The comic charisma Agyeman brought to the role was, for many, the highlight of that production, stealing the limelight from even Tom Holland's celebrity Romeo.
'It was the first time I'd done Shakespeare,' she says, slightly shyly. Thus far, Freeman's two-­decade career has been dominated by classy television turns. She spent two seasons in Doctor Who opposite David Tennant as the Doctor's companion Martha Jones (and appeared in Torchwood, too); she also starred in ITV's Law & Order: UK, Little Dorrit and the long-running American medical drama New Amsterdam. 'I didn't go to drama school,' she explains. 'So I was learning on the job, even though that's a dirty phrase to many – at least, that's how people have sometimes made me feel.' There were a few other stage roles – including Apologia in 2017 and God of ­Carnage in 2023 – but not many. 'To be honest, I assumed I didn't even have the skills to work in the theatre.'
Yet here she is, aged 46, fin­ally a ris­ing Shakespearean star. At the end of last year, Agyeman won rave reviews for her wittily imperious Olivia in Twelfth Night at the RSC, and she's back in Stratford this month in a new production of Much Ado About Nothing, playing the 'bad­ass' Beatrice, as she calls Shak­e­s­peare's verbally lethal heroine.
Michael Longhurst's take on Shakespeare 's romcom is the ­second to open in almost as many months; Jamie Lloyd's recent revival, starring the celebrity double act of Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston, has just finished a West End run. The Longhurst production, though, is high-concept: it's set in the modern world of social media and celebrity football. Agyeman promises it'll have plenty to say about Wags, influencers, brand management, cancel culture and, in the tricky subplot involving ­Beatrice's cousin, Hero, who's wrongfully accused of infidelity, 'slut-shaming'. 'We're definitely going there,' Agyeman says of some of the less breezy strands in the play. 'If you remove the bits from Shakespeare that make you uncomfortable and simply present it as a beautiful package, then what are you learning?'
Agyeman rarely does interviews, and I've been warned she's nervous about this one. We've met at the RSC rehearsal studios in Clapham during her lunch break; she's suit­ably dressed down in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt, her long braids tied back in a casual knot. She's tight-lipped about her private life, unwilling to even say where she lives, describing herself instead as a 'nomad'. Yet discussing her craft, she's expansive, ­gregarious, generous. One reason why Shakespeare directors love casting her is her ­natural felicity with the verse, in an era when decent verse-speaking is regarded as an increasingly endangered art.
Nonetheless, Agyeman was initially worried that she didn't sound 'right' for the role of a Shakespearean protagonist. 'My voice is my voice, but it's a very London voice. And I did wonder how I was going to squeeze myself into becoming a lady such as Olivia. But I remember Prasanna [Puwanarajah, who directed Twelfth Night] saying Shakespeare would be punching his fist in the air in his grave at the sound of me, because he conceived his plays to be accessible. Status comes in so many different ways – so why do we attach so much impor­tance to how a person sounds?'
Agyeman radiates confidence, though it's tempered with a dose of impostor syndrome. Born in 1979, she was brought up in Hackney to parents of mixed Iranian Kurdish and Ghanaian heritage, and was academically inclined at school before choosing acting at Middle­sex University. Yet a funding crisis meant the course suddenly changed to performance arts, and Agyeman, who by her own admission isn't a natural dancer or singer, found herself unsure whether she was cut out for a career as an actress at all.
On graduating, she drifted instead into jobs at a gym and a video store, before being persuaded by a former fellow student to become a member of their acting co-op, in which a group of actors work as agents for themselves. 'To put it crudely, they wanted an actor of every type on their books, and they were lacking a black girl of a certain age, so I went along. And we spent our days cold-calling the industry. I learnt a huge amount, including that most people tend to respond to a cold call by slamming down the phone. But I also got my first proper job that way, with Lola Wise in Crossroads.'
She followed the ITV series with Doctor Who, in which she appeared as Martha Jones from 2007 to 2010: it's the role for which she remains best known in this country. After that came the prosecutor Alesha Phillips in Law & Order: UK, and then in 2015 she embarked on a prolonged stint in the US with roles in New Amsterdam and the cult Netflix sci-fi drama Sense8. Several non-white British actors have said that they've found it easier to get work in America than they have in Britain, particularly earlier on in their careers, but Agyeman isn't sure.
'It's a hard one, because someone was willing to take a chance on me with Lola, and I went to the US on the back of what I had achieved here. But the [industry in the US] did seem to be more available to ­different sorts of people. It felt like more of an open door. Whereas here...' She trails off. Does she think the door here is still closed against people from minority cultures? 'Yes. I would say so. But this is a long conversation.'
As is the subject of racial abuse. She received a fair amount of it when she starred as Martha, who was the Doctor's first black ­companion. 'I didn't anticipate – and maybe I was naive – the racism from certain sectors of the fanbase,' she said at the Ofcom Diversity in Broadcasting event in 2021. 'I couldn't rationalise it.' Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, who played Juliet opposite Agyeman in Lloyd's recent production, similarly received online abuse and hate mail throughout the run. But Agyeman is reluctant to comment. I ask whether she thinks audience responses to casting decisions are becoming more vitriolic. There's a long pause. 'It's not something I can answer in the short amount of time we have in this interview. It's too deep.'
We move onto Dreamland, Sky's sunny Margate-set comedy, developed from a Sharon Horgan short. Last year, Agyeman played the pregnant Trish in it, opposite Lily Allen's drifter sister Mel. Once again, she doubted whether she was right for the role. 'The first thing I said to the director was, 'I can't do comedy',' she says with a grin. 'But then I realised I needed to tell Trish's quite absurd life story, which by default is flipping funny.'
She praises Dreamland as an example of female-led drama, with a predominately female creative team, but agrees that the persistence of such tags can't be considered a positive thing. 'If we are still using phrases such as 'female-led' then that's indicative of the status quo, which is deeply troubling,' she says. 'We still don't have a level playing field.'
Agyeman may be in her mid-40s, but her career still feels under-the-radar in the UK. It's perhaps because she spent a decade away in America; or perhaps because she doesn't court celebrity. 'I was lucky. I was quite old, 26, when I got Doctor Who. And it was before social media, so I didn't come up through that route. And I've never had any desire to change things about my lifestyle in any way.'
All the same, that lifestyle sounds like a good balance between the disciplined and the pleasurable. She's at pains, for instance, to make sure she always has a well-stocked bar wherever she lives. 'I don't want to be an advert for alcohol, but I do like there to always be the potential for a party,' she says. 'I'm the sort of girl who can disappear into a cave for months and just do yoga. And I'm also the sort of girl to be the last one standing.'