by ‘People can be quite selective about ‘authenticity’ in drama,” shrugs Anjana Vasan. “Nobody cares if the prince of Denmark or the duke of Verona talks like he went to Eton.” But she notes that when someone with a different skin tone takes on roles in Shakespeare’s and Ibsen’s plays, people talk about the Western canon being so great that it can speak to anyone It’s amazing that someone like me can see themselves in that world.”
The 37-year-old – who won an Olivier Award last year for a heartwarming turn as Stella in the Almeida Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and received back-to-back TV Bafta nominations, for channel 4’s We Are Lady Parts (2023) sitcom, and Black Mirror: Demon 79 (2024) – she credits her childhood in Singapore’s melting pot culture for her passion for diverse drama.
Born in Chennai (formerly Madras), India, in 1987 to Tamil Hindu parents, Vasan was only four years old when her family moved to Singapore. “I know some people think the city is shiny, superficial, about finances,” says Vasan. “But that stuff was just background noise to me, because I was drawn to the vibrant cultural life of the city. I grew up loving the theatre. Because people come from all over the world to live and work in Singapore, I saw people from all over the world on stage, doing Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill.”
Vasan was so enamored with Singaporean theater that she planned to spend her career there. However, after graduating with a degree in theater studies at the National University of Singapore, she failed to get a scholarship to stay on and ended up on a masters course in Cardiff in 2011 instead. “Having lived most of my life in such a busy, loud urban environment, Cardiff was like an oasis,” she says. “When my teachers suggested I stay in the UK to see if I could get parts, I decided to give it a shot.”
She immediately landed small roles with the National Theater and the RSC, as well as the Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat. It’s not hard to see what the casting directors saw – her intelligent emotional range is evident from those satellite dish eyes. She laughed: “They take up a lot of the surface area of my face. It’s really hard to lie when I have big eyes, and when I’m filming, with the camera straight up in my face, I feel like the audience can feel my thoughts.”
Unusually, Vasan has been cast mostly in classical drama on stage and more often than not in comedies on screen – “Crying on stage and crying for the camera,” as she says. She was a witch in Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth and was nominated for an Evening Standard Theater Award for her role in A Doll’s House at the Lyric Hammersmith. TV audiences will have seen her as an unlikely assassin in the fourth series of Killing Eve, before starring as Muslim feminist Amina in We Are Lady Parts and as a demonic serial killer girl shop in Black Mirror: Demon 79 .
Now back for a second series, the anarchic We Are Lady Parts is written and directed by Nida Manzoor. Born in London and of Pakistani Muslim heritage, she was raised in Singapore until she was 10 years old. The sitcom features Vasan as a sweet, nerdy, hijab-wearing biologist who ends up out of his comfort zone as the Muslim feminist lead guitarist. punk band, described in a voice-over as “a confusing mix of hate songs and edgy girl power – one part boredom and two parts identity crisis”. The women in the band are all struggling to find their voice without losing their faith or being rejected by their community. Their original songs, such as the lovable Bashir with the Good Beard, and Voldemort Under My Headscarf, in which the women cry back at the fear they cause on the streets of London, are full of comic madness.
Vasan was already a singer and songwriter – she released her first album in 2017 – but “identifying more with Amina’s country guitar background”, she laughs at the challenge of learning how to strap an electric guitar. for the show. “I felt very villainous,” she says. “But Amina is a smooth, versatile character. She is not cool. So it was really fun to find out how she could find that redeeming punk spirit.”
Auditioning for the part, Vasan improvised and bit the head of a flower. “I think Amina is a clown, and I’ve always thought clowns are really powerful. I loved comics like Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball when I was growing up. And at drama school, I started to notice that actors who could make people laugh were often moving in serious parts, but often the most serious actors couldn’t do comedy.”
Because the We Are Lady Parts cast plays all the songs you hear on the show, Vasan says they developed strong bonds. “We practiced and practiced and ended up with the kind of chemistry you can’t fake. Some of the songs are so fast that there’s no room for ‘acting’, however, because we’re all playing so hard… I found myself wanting the camera to zoom in on my show fret to show that I’m really playing solo!”
As a cultural Hindu who says she is not “very spiritual”, did Vasan have any doubts about playing a Muslim character? “Yes,” she said. “I had a very honest conversation with Nida, because the sitcom only started as a short film in 2018. When the series was commissioned, I had no idea where the characters were going and I had to ask Nida how much my part was. the faith of the character would enter the scene.” Manzoor insisted that Vasan take the part, expressing the common transitions between culture and religion for most South Asian women. “Amina wears the hijab and is not afraid of her faith,” says Vasan. “But she’s also an individual on a musical journey from country music to punk, from anxiety to confidence, and that’s a journey I felt I could chart.”
The only downside to the role is that Vasan got a string of scripts about women who wear hijab as a result. She snorts: “Lazy solutions! I’ve told other hijab parts that didn’t feel right to me.”
But she “thoroughly enjoyed” her role in Demon 79, although she notes that it was “disturbing” to think about the racism her Indian character, Nida, faced in northern England in the 1970s. We see Nida struggle with the casual racism of her employers (who ask her to stop bringing Indian food to work and eat something “normal”) and the violent threats of skinhead National Front leaders who put slogans on her front door.
It’s ironic that it’s an era where everything – from the uniforms of the shop staff to everyone’s interior decoration – is brown, yet her skin is an unwelcome brown. The horror turns darkly comic when she accidentally kills a demon, Gaap, who appears in the form of Boney M’s main man Bobby Farrell (played by Paapa Essiedu), who tells her that she must commit a series of brutal murders. prevent an immediate apocalypse.
Vasan points out that although Demon 79 is set in the past, it always looks to the future: “I think these things [political movements and tensions] move in cycles. When you’re watching the news, it’s hard not to worry about where we’re going. The names and faces of the politicians may change, they may look more palatable than the racist politician in the show, but the spiel is just as terrible.” Vasan shakes her head and closes her big beautiful eyes. “We like to believe we’re past it, but we’re not far from heading towards destruction.”
We Are Lady Parts returns to Channel 4 on May 30
