Hollywood actor David Harewood talked to Joe Wicks about his struggles as a British black actor and the Black Lives Matter movement.
Harewood is also a BAFTA nominated documentary maker, who is best known for his role in US drama Homeland.
In the third episode of The Joe Wicks podcast he talks to Joe about breaking through as a struggling actor, finding success in the US and how both the UK and America have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Talking about how hard it’s been for him to find work in the UK as a black actor, and how his tenacity to succeed has led him to leading roles in Hollywood, David said: “I knew I had talent, I was always convinced that it wasn’t necessarily me and that my agent was always saying you need to get to America… that’s why the major black actors in the UK leave, there just isn’t the industry to support us.”
On the ways in which he feels both the UK and America have responded to the Black Lives Matter movement, he said: “People are starting to take notice but many black people are already commenting that that window of opportunity is closing, particularly in this country.
“In corporate America major changes are happening… there’s been a little bit of that in the UK but I feel here it is a very different struggle.
“Racism and its effects still isn’t really understood here and because our system is essentially a class based system it gets swallowed up in that paradigm as the working class will say ‘well, join the queue’… it is a particularly different struggle so it is very difficult to get people to acknowledge that there is a specificity to racism and how it effects people of colour in this country.”
David says that he was really pleased to see footballers and cricketers kneeling, being unified and making a stand against racism.
The response from F1 drivers was different, which he says: “It really brought it home to me that they just fundamentally don’t understand what the issue is.
“I’m not saying they are racist, they’re not… there were four or five drivers standing whilst Lewis and all the other drivers were kneeling, it just looked weird… if we don’t all stand together and say we are all standing against racism I don’t really see what the point is.”
The Joe Wicks Podcast is available now on BBC Sounds.
