When Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù becomes animated during conversation, his speaking voice – ordinarily a sort of polished inner-city London dialect – dances into a smooth Nigerian accent. As it happens, his shoulders ease, his eyes smile, he is totally relaxed. If it is true that we become the most distilled versions of ourselves when we are at our most comfortable, then it is clear here that the very essence of Dìrísù’s personhood is a Nigerian man.
The opportunity to nurture his Nigerian identity was a significant factor in Dìrísù’s decision to take on his latest film, the Bafta-nominated My Father’s Shadow. The entire project – on which he serves both as lead actor and executive producer – was shot on location in Lagos, the country’s former capital city, over an eight-week period in early 2024. “I’d have said yes if the script was half as good,” Dìrísù says. “When I first got it I was excited to just be working in Nigeria: it was so important for me not only to work there, but also to be in the country independently as an adult. And to get to see my grandma more than once in a year! On top of this, not a lot of actors get to tell a story as tender, beautiful and considered as this one.”
We meet late morning on the day after Boxing Day. Though we’re both south Londoners, Dìrísù has made a cryptic request to meet north of the river; the text message says he “needs” to be in Highbury in the early afternoon. It’s when he arrives wearing a vintage Arsenal shirt from their 1990-1992 era that it all makes sense. He hasn’t been able to use his season ticket recently because he has temporarily relocated to the US east coast to shoot All the Sinners Bleed, a forthcoming Netflix series from showrunner Joe Robert Cole. But now, he’s in London and Arsenal are playing at home, so that’s where he needs to be.
Set during Nigeria’s 1993 election crisis, My Father’s Shadow is inspired by the relationship its creators – brothers Wale Davies and Akinola Davies Jr (the latter directs, but the piece is co-written) – have with their late father, who died from epilepsy when the two of them were babies. It follows a father, Fọlárìn, and his young sons as they spend a day in Lagos, while political unrest threatens the journey back home to their village. “On the surface level, the movie is about a father taking the opportunity to reconnect with his sons,” Dìrísù explains. “But it is [also] a fantastical, pseudo-biographical piece of work about grief and loss and family, fatherhood, masculinity, connection and absence.”
Although the film is about the relationship Wale and Akinola have with their father, they were clear with Dìrísù very early in the process that he was not being asked to recreate a memory. Without their father as the reference point, he turned to his own. “It’s in the way he calls my name, or the way he stands, and some of his facial expressions and mannerisms,” Dìrísù says. “There was a real celebration of the relationship that I have with him in a way that maybe I hadn’t quite intended. That tenderness I learned from him.” And the disciplinarian? “Oh man, yeah – I have definitely been shouted at like that before!”, he says. “Ultimately we are our parents’ children. There’s a lot of him that lives in me so when I draw my own artistry and the disposition of my life, he’s there in the most positive ways. I’m just grateful I had him as a father.”Tenderness is a word that comes up a lot.
Fatherhood regularly shows up as a theme across Dìrísù’s CV: it’s there in the 2018 Netflix horror His House, in which he stars opposite Wunmi Mosaku. They play a refugee couple from Sudan struggling to adjust to their new life in a small English town after the death of their young daughter. In Gangs of London – a Sky Atlantic series about power struggles in the city’s criminal underworld – the fact his character Elliot has a son is a notable plot point. He wouldn’t say it’s intentional, but he’s aware of it. “As someone who is very ambitious to become a parent at some point in my life, the questions about it are constantly present.”
Of My Father’s Shadow he says he couldn’t have had the on-screen relationship he had with his co-stars (and real-life brothers) Chibuike Marvellous Egbo and Godwin Chiemerie Egbo without also developing that dynamic off screen; teaching them how to swim (“though I won’t take full credit for that, they still can’t!”), answering questions on acting technique and keeping them out of the crew’s – and harm’s – way during filming.
Dìrísù had great insecurity about his own performance. Perhaps this comes from portraying a man so solidly rooted in his Nigerian identity, but being what he describes as a Nigerian of the diaspora, not of the country. His upbringing and familial home was unquestionably Nigerian, but he has never lived there. The distance that comes from that circumstance is something he is actively trying to close. A huge part of that is learning to speak Yoruba more fluently – he took about 30 hours of lessons to prepare for the role. “Put me in a Yoruba-only speaking area and I wouldn’t die, I wouldn’t starve, but I wouldn’t run for office, y’know?” he says. But it’s the most valuable gift of this experience: “If there’s one thing I would take from my career of learning skills so far, it wouldn’t be jiujitsu, or kung fu, or boxing – it would be the ability to communicate with my ancestors.”
There has been a lot made of the narrative that My Father’s Shadow was the first Nigerian film to be invited to screen at the Cannes film festival. While it’s true it was the first to be selected for the festival’s Official Selection – it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the event, winning the Special Mention for the Camera D’Or prize – Dìrísù is at pains to clarify that other Nigerian films have been shown at the festival before My Father’s Shadow. “There is this wilful amnesia to the quality of Nigerian film,” he says. “I don’t want to take praise away from the wonderfully well-achieving films that come out of Nigeria that aren’t celebrated by the west. Maybe they weren’t considered for the Grand Prix or any of the other prizes that could be awarded [at Cannes], but they were there.”
In any case Dìrísù is ambivalent about such accolades, which feel to him less like a legitimate reason to celebrate and more like an indictment on an industry that has often been all but impenetrable to Black talent seeking to tell stories about Black life. He’s also cognisant of allowing a western gaze to too much influence his understanding of success. “It reminds me of when director Bong Joon-ho won the best film Oscar for Parasite and said: ‘This is still basically just a local awards ceremony.’ That was so incredibly defiant of him to basically say if the west doesn’t say it’s good it doesn’t mean it’s not good, y’know?”
Dìrísù has loved taking in the general audience response to the showings that have taken place across the world since its Cannes premiere. “I remember when I was at school and this really influential teacher said a play – and I extend this to any sort of performance – should be able to be experienced, enjoyed, by someone who’s deaf, someone who doesn’t speak the language, someone who’s blind. The quality of the storytelling should transcend traditional barriers to entry. That sentiment has come back with our film, which is in Yoruba and pidgin and English and is subtitled but it is touching people in places like Korea. That’s a really, really wonderful experience.”
There are few films Dìrísù would say are more of a love letter to its people and places than this one. It’s an accurate summation. We meet strangers for the first time who feel warmly familiar, the honestly captured landscapes create a longing to return to places we’ve never visited: it’s both a representation and an invitation. In interviews, director Akinola has spoken a lot about the Lagos of the 80s and 90s he grew up in disappearing as time goes on. Dìrísù recalls him talking about wanting to capture and honour the mundanities of that life. “There’s a lot where nothing is happening but it’s so engaging and texturally accurate to that period and that place. If we don’t put a lens on these things, we don’t cherish them. They can be erased; they can be forgotten. Akinola wanted to crystallise the Nigeria of his childhood in memory by making this film. And I think he really has.”
My Father’s Shadow is in UK cinemas from 6 February, distributed by MUBI.