‘Shoplifters’: How the movie Wunmi Mosaku “kept putting off” watching became her perfect project
You can only imagine what it must have been like in Wunmi Mosaku’s house when this year’s Oscars nominations were revealed, completing her nigh-on 20-year journey from a Manchester housing estate to competing for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in the biggest industry awards on earth.
She should be a household name by now, that’s for sure, and her performance in Sinners, the jaw-dropping vampire movie that’s become the most nominated in Academy Awards history, is just as good as the rest of the cast; that is to say, unbelievably good. Mosaku plays Annie in the film, the homely woman who channels black magic and to whom Smoke, one half of Michael B Jordan’s twin characters, returns as an estranged partner time and again.
Hopefully you will have seen Sinners by now, because frankly, regardless of personal film preference, it is a piece of work everyone should see; genre-defying, a mash-up of completely different styles, visually incredible, musically superb and with performances all over the place that warrant gongs come March.
Mosaku has been putting in that kind of work for years now, and in similarly supernatural films too: any horror fan will love her movie His House, which was lost in the mess of Covid to some degree, but is a terrifying experience following a couple seeking refuge and asylum in the UK, only to find their ramshackle council house is haunted by evil spirits.
It’s horrific because it is so rooted in everyday reality, and Mosaku is fantastically believable, a proper actor honed by years spent on stage where mistakes or forgotten lines can’t just be rewound or done in another take. She had already won a Bafta thanks to her role in the harrowing TV film Damilola, Our Loved Boy back in 2016, and the same year as His House, she prepped for Sinners by appearing in the thematically similar Lovecraft Country on HBO.
Mosaku has certainly found success in reflecting the struggles faced by many minorities, and she spoke to the Oscars about one film that influenced her in particular, a Japanese drama from 2018 about a family in poverty having to steal in order to make ends meet.
“When Shoplifters came out, my husband and my auntie kept telling me, ‘You’ve got to watch this film,’ and I kept putting it off,” she said, before explaining, “Generally, if you put me in a dark room, I’ll want to go to sleep. I’m dyslexic as well, so reading the subtitles in foreign films can be really hard for me. But watching Shoplifters was, for me, like the first time I actually read a novel.
“I usually just read plays or short stories, but when I read a novel for the first time, I felt like I finally got to experience the full breadth of a story.”
Shoplifters would win the Palm d’Or at Cannes that year in addition to nominations at the Oscars and the Golden Globes, earning $72million on a budget of less than ten.
Mosaku added, “Shoplifters was the first time a foreign film really opened me up like that. Reading the subtitles wasn’t a chore, and my heart really broke open. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought the subtitles would create a separation between the film and I, but they didn’t. It’s a perfect film.”
While she waits to see if she can land one of the top prizes at the Academy Awards, Mosaku is involved in a few different upcoming projects, including The Social Reckoning, the long-awaited follow-up to 2010’s The Social Network, often regarded as one of the century’s finest. Aaron Sorkin has again written the screenplay, which he’ll direct in place of David Fincher.
