Caribbean Beat — May/June 2019 (#157)

ackstory
Wright on
As a child in Guyana, Letitia Wright
could not have known she’d grow up
to be an award-winning actress, star
of international blockbuster films like
Black Panther. Her parents might have
preferred a career in medicine or law — but
once the acting bug bit her, Wright did
everything it took to build the career of her
dreams, even despite her struggles with
depression, writes Caroline Taylor
Despite a cast brimming with
award-winning Hollywood legends,
there was scarcely a Black
Panther review that didn’t effusively
single out Guyanese-British
actress Letitia Wright — playing
the title character’s science whiz little sister, Shuri
— as the film’s scene-stealing breakout star.
Born on Halloween in 1993, Wright migrated
with her family from Guyana to Tottenham, north
London, when she was seven. Unsurprisingly, it
was a culture shock — from the climate to the
people. “As Guyanese, we are accustomed to saying
good morning and good afternoon to everyone
. . . close to our neighbours, helping each other out,
and trying to be united despite our situation. But
when I came to England, everyone avoided you,
locked themselves away indoors, and nobody said
hello to each other,” she recalls.
The requisite adjustment to her new home also
sowed the early seeds of her acting talent. The
children at her primary school would laugh at her
accent. So, with the steely determination that would
come to characterise many other major moments of
her life, she resolved to transform how she sounded.
That’s not to say that the Guyanese accent is no
more. She can still slip back into it at will — not
least, she jokes, when her mother is in the room.
But it wasn’t until she saw the 2006 film Akeelah
and the Bee — starring young black actress Keke
Palmer as an eleven-year-old national spelling bee
competitor — that the acting bug really took hold.
“[Akeelah] looked like me, she was positive, she
just wanted to contribute,” Wright says. “I wanted
to tell stories like that . . . I wanted to be captured
in a weird camera thing that records.”
Convinced this was the path for her, she set
about making it happen — despite her family’s
resistance. “When I grew up in Guyana, we didn’t
have an acting industry,” she explains. “We’re
more focused on the academic side of things —
being a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher.” But in
Britain, there was one shining exception: “We had
this amazing show called Desmond’s, about this
Guyanese man and his wife — they have a barbershop
in Peckham . . . And this is a hit show. I grew
up on Desmond’s, and he represented Guyana. He
made us proud,” she told Ebony last year.
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