He is almost 40 years into his career, but Lennie James is still keeping things fresh. The 59-year-old south Londoner has run the gauntlet of high-octane TV dramas, playing Morgan Jones for more than 10 years in the wildly successful apocalypse dramaThe Walking Deadand its spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead; bent copper DCI Tony Gates in Line of Duty; and the down-and-out philanderer Nelly Rowe in Sky’s Save Me. In person, though, James is the polar opposite of the characters he is best known for – considered, introspective and disarmingly earnest.
Last year, he took on a radically different role, as Barrington (below) in the BBC adaptation of Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman, a closeted Windrush-generation Caribbean man in a secret relationship with his best friend. Quietly moving, it is a drastic shift in tone for James, and has earned him his first solo Bafta TV nomination.
What has the response to Mr Loverman been like?Older black men and women have come up to me and found different ways of saying thank you. I read that as thank you for finally telling this untold story, of the LGBTQ+ people who were also on the boats coming from the West Indies to search for a better life.
Bernardine Evaristo was told Mr Loverman was ‘too niche’ tobe adapted for TV, because it’s ‘black, gay and old’. What does it mean to you tohelp disprove that?I had no doubt whatsoever it would be made from the moment I read the book, and I wanted to be playing Barry.
The show feels very London, but you actually split your time between LA and the UK. What is the atmosphere like in the US at the moment?I’ve been on and off in America for 17 years, and it’s unlike any other time I’ve been here. There is a battle going on for the soul of this country. It’s scary, particularly if you are in any way deemed as “other”. A lot of the rights we fought for are under threat. It’s scary for our industry, too, because there will come a point where they will try to dictate our output. That censorship has already started.
Do you thinka show like Mr Loverman would get made inpresent-dayUS?I doubt it. It is the kind of story that many connected to the present administration would like not to be told. One thing that has taken me by surprise, being a black Brit in America, is how little white America and black America know about one another. That gulf between the two is in danger of getting wider.
Does the political turmoilmake you consider moving back to the UK?Of course. But I don’t like being told what to do. If there’s anything I learned from growing up in a racially explosive time, where people were telling you who you could be, it was a very firm “fuck that”. This feels very much like one of those times again. And to walk away, although it’s obviously very tempting, feels wrong.
You’re probably most famous for playing Morgan Jones inThe Walking Dead. Did you learn anything about survival from being on the show?One of the byproducts of being in the zombie world for as long as I was, was I started having very vivid and lucid dreams. I would quite often wake up shouting in the midst of a night terror, waking the house and making it difficult for my wife to sleep next to me. Someone suggested CBD oil, and it works. So I’d take that into a dystopia.
What is a TV show you’ve binge-watched this year?The Pitt. It was such brave storytelling. I started watching it with my wife and then I was away filming. Neither of us could wait, so we watched it separately then had to figure out how far the other one had got so we could talk about it.
Any guilty pleasure shows?White Lotus. I hadn’t seen the first two seasons – I’m not very good at watching obnoxious characters on screen – but one of my best mates, Jason Isaacs, is in the latest season. I started watching it, and it hooked me. Jas’s performance was fantastic. We’ve known each other since just after drama school. I’m not as good as him, but I try.
The BaftaTelevisionAwards with P&O Cruises is on BBC One and BBC iPlayer on 11 May at 7pm.
Catch the full lineup of our Bafta TV special launching across the weekend and starring best actor nominees David Tennant,Lennie James, Monica Dolan, Billie Piper, Richard Gadd, Marisa Abela and Sharon D Clarke
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