The actor has gone from Manchester charity shop rifler to Hollywood’s most wanted. As she stars in the hot new show from The Wire team, she opens up about sweet-talking racist cops … and why David Simon left her a ‘bumbling fool’
For people who know TV, who appreciate its potential and its reach, a new Baltimore-set cop show from the creators of The Wire – AKA “the greatest TV show of all time” – is a big deal. A Very Big Deal. Wunmi Mosaku – one of the new show’s stars – has one of those very excited people as her husband. “The Wire is his favourite show,” Mosaku tells me from their home in Los Angeles. “He’s watched it all the way through five times.” Indeed, having missed The Wire when it first broadcast in 2002, Mosaku was midway through season one when she was called in to audition for the latest HBO miniseries by David Simon. She immediately pressed pause. “I didn’t want to internalise the pressure and go into the meeting with too much reverence,” she says. “Don’t get me wrong, I give people their props, and they’ve obviously created the greatest TV show of all time, but I don’t want to be a bumbling fool because of that!”
It was the right call, clearly. Mosaku was cast in the pivotal role of composed and tenacious civil rights attorney Nicole Steele in We Own This City, which starts on Sky Atlantic this week. The “city” in question is Baltimore, MD, and most of those involved in the production – from the head writers to the catering crew – are local either to that area, or to nearby Washington DC. Mosaku, meanwhile, was raised some 3,500 miles away, by Nigerian parents in the hippy-ish Manchester suburb of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, yet she never felt left out on set. “That whole crew from The Wire, they’re a family and they aren’t interested in cornering off. All they want is to expand the family, and expand the love of the city and its people.”
