The Reinvention of Noma Dumezweni

When Dumezweni got Cursed Child in 2016, her life changed. She had to navigate the exposure, initially quite ugly, of being a Black actress taking on a role previously cast as white. J.K. Rowling strongly defended the decision at the time on social media, a major show of support that Dumezweni felt from the author throughout. “I really like Jo, the person I’ve met a few times,” she says. When asked about Rowling’s more recent public comments about gender, widely criticized as transphobic, Dumezweni strongly defends queer rights, saying, “The trans conversation has now become the bogeyman for any [political] excuse,” but demurs beyond that: “I cannot speak to the trans conversation in relation to J.K. I can speak to my love for the stories.” 

However, she says of Max’s upcoming Harry Potter series, “For me that’s too soon. It’s too soon! We need another generation. It’s almost like the kids have got to be grandparents for the TV series to come out again.” She has a burner Twitter account, through which she gauged reactions to the recent announcement of the show: “Looking at that conversation of ‘Is Hermione going to be Black? What’s canon?’—that’s why it’s too close. It’s all too close.”

As part of the Broadway transfer for Cursed Child, Hollywood discovered Dumezweni. Casting directors Tiffany Little Canfield and Bernard Telsey saw the show, then brought her in to read for Mary Poppins Returns, directed by Rob Marshall; she nabbed the role of Penny Farthing. (“Jump-cut”: Marshall then cast her in The Little Mermaid. More on that later.) As Cursed Child wrapped its run, she realized her child’s education was going well in New York, and considered staying. Then she booked the Manhattan-set The Undoing. “Well, look at the universe,” Dumezweni remembers thinking. “It wants us to stay.”

On David E. Kelley’s The Undoing, Dumezweni played Haley, the stern defense attorney for Hugh Grant’s Jonathan Fraser, an oncologist standing trial for murder. In every scene, she owned that courtroom: withering and persuasive and darkly, sometimes morbidly funny. Memes of the character dominated social media as the show gained steam. “It was such a shock,” Dumezweni says. “I was so fucking nervous. I thought I was going to be fired on that job, because I was so—I got into my head.” She looked around at people like Grant and Nicole Kidman and thought to herself, “I’m just an absolute minnow.” But she felt even greater pressure portraying an American, sensitive to the debate around Black British actors taking on US roles: “If I’m being honest, it was when the African American women said, ‘Yeah, we know Haley, we like her’…that I went, ‘I did okay.’”

The Undoing was, like The Watcher, a suspenseful story centered on rich white people. With The Watcher, though, she had more confidence, figuring P.I. Theodora Birch out as a kind of quasi-narrator, and running with that interpretation as she brilliantly charged through chunks of exposition. But once Hilton Als’s Instagram ode was posted, her mindset shifted. As Dumezweni describes it, “These opportunities are brilliant for work, but then you go, Oh, but now let’s start looking outside: How were the optics of that?” 

Allow me a jump-cut to earlier in the conversation, when Dumezweni says to me, “This world of TV and film is gorgeous, money is lovely, but it’s quite lonely…. You go sit in your trailer, or maybe chat a little with people, but everyone’s on their phone and then you’re done. You’re done.” I wonder if this loneliness is related to Dumezweni’s conflicted feelings about making projects in which she plays the most notable, if not only, Black character—however sizable the part. “We have to be brave and say no to things sometimes,” she says. “There are still risks to be taken, and the risk is not working on something that you want.”

Which brings us, maybe, to the present. Later this month, The Little Mermaid will hit theaters, years after Dumezweni’s initial casting. She originated a new character, mother (as in, queen) to Jonah Hauer-King’s Prince Eric, and relished each day at work. “I can’t fucking believe that I’m in a Disney movie, because that’s not the narrative I told myself,” she says. “And I think it’s a thing of beauty.” She felt its bigness making it—the A-list craftspeople behind every element of production, the groundbreaking nature of Halle Bailey in the lead role.

While she waits for its release, she’s in production on another Kelley series, Presumed Innocent, toplined by Jake Gyllenhaal. When that script came her way, she balked. “I remember reading the word judge—and I was like, ‘Oh, judge.’ It’s always Black and brown people playing judges,” she says. Her manager convinced her to keep reading, and it hooked her. The role is “salty, slightly odd.” Fresh. Jump-cut to her post-Watcher epiphany. “There’s a little bit of a worry in me that Judge Lydia Lyttle is part of that,” she says. “But we’ve got Ruth Negga there, we’ve got O-T Fagbenle. There are enough of us—different versions of Blackness.”

Dumezweni says she doesn’t feel herself going “deeper” with this part—for her as an actor, “It feels lateral.” The other day, her mom texted, asking how things were going in LA. That may be the impetus for the question she keeps coming back to as we chat: “What’s it all about?” As Dumezweni has learned what is possible for herself—a trip to the Tonys, an HBO showcase, a Disney breakout—she has learned, perhaps, that making change for oneself is possible too. “I don’t want to get complacent about this gig, because it’s been hard-won,” she says. “But my choices will determine whether I do or not. That’s what I’m sitting in.”