EXCLUSIVE: Sophie Okonedo’s accolades include an Oscar nomination for Hotel Rwanda, a Tony trophy for A Raisin in the Sun, several TV BAFTA nominations, and a slew of honors for her acclaimed stage roles in the West End and on Broadway. For all that, she still insists that it’s a misconception to call her a “leading lady,” which “is so not the case,” she protests.

 “Actually, I don’t play loads of leading parts. I make a lot of smaller parts look bigger than they are and I’ve been doing that for a long time,” she declares. Plus, it’s easier “when you’re given a gift like this.”

The gift in question is Mouse, the latest film from Ghostlight filmmakers Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, which has its world premiere tonight at the Berlin Film Festival.

Okonedo plays Helen Bell, a once-celebrated concert pianist who happily gives it all up to marry an oaf and then settle down with him in Little Rock, Arkansas, to raise their precociously talented high school daughter, Callie (Chloe Coleman), who yearns to study singing at Juilliard.  

Callie hangs out with her more inhibited best friend, Minnie Dunn, played spectacularly well by Katherine Mallen Kupferer. 

Kupferer’s real-life mother, the splendid Tara Mallen, plays her seemingly down-and-out mom in Mouse. 

Then in a flash, life happens, and worlds are upended. No spoilers here.

We’re somewhat hamstrung because both of us have been asked by Adam Kersh, one of the film’s executive producers, not to give away the plot, which is fair enough as the film won’t be publicly shown until later today. 

But in the film, people are grieving and your heart aches when we watch how Helen copes with her grief. Okonedo says that being an incredibly sensitive person serves her well in such scenes. “So you only have to suggest something to me and I can sort of feel it, which is really good for acting, really bad for real life.”

She doesn’t want to sound all “mystical” because that’s not her style, but she becomes mildly irritated ”when actors are talking about how they spent three years doing whatever as a method sort of thing,” She explains: “I’m like, ‘That is lovely, but I never get that luxury.’ I’m never cast years ahead to be able to do that or in a sort of budget that would allow you to do that much research, except from the theater.” When she played Medea two years ago, and the Egyptian queen Cleopatra opposite Ralph Fiennes in Antony and Cleopatra, she had over a year to prepare.

“That gave me a lot of time to just read around it and get into it,” she adds.

That’s not the case with every acting gig.  In the case of Mouse, however, to capture emotional moments, she reached for a “very instinctive part of me, which is kind of not a cerebral part of me at all. It’s like something just very instinctive and sort of guttural and sort of physical in a way.”

That instinctive part of her is put to magnificent use in Mouse, and she shows it in ways both small and large, especially in scenes she shares with Kupferer, and later on in a searing tangle with Mallen.

As I began to discuss the sheer level of maturity that Helen displays at one point, Okonedo interrupts to observe that it’s not about her acting, it’s about what she’s reacting to on the page.  

“God, I don’t know how Kelly writes these things,” she says admiringly of O’Sullivan’s screenplay, “because I think she’s about 40 now or something. She hasn’t quite got to that age yet…But it’s so perceptive, that’s not me improvising, that’s what she wrote.”

Key strands of the film are about mothering with laser focus on the parents played by Okonedo and Mallen. “What is it to be a mother? That is a huge part of the film…What I liked about Helen is, well, she’s quite abrasive. She’s not all about baking pies,” she suggests.

When the filmmakers initially approached her, they posted Okonedo the Mouse script plus a link to their 2024 gem Ghostlight (which features Katherine Mallen Kupferer and her parents Tara Mallen and Keith Kupferer). 

Okonedo didn’t know of O’Sullivan and Thomason at all, a consequence of living in the countryside, with the occasional trip into the big city to see plays. Otherwise, she admits, “I’m just in a bubble a lot of the time.”

After reading the script, she instantly wanted to do it. Then she watched Ghostlight, which sealed the deal “because it’s about the theater and about what storytelling can do and how it can transform your life, even if you don’t have to be an actor, but in amateur dramatics or whatever.”

She continues: “It was just such a wonderful movie. And also, I just loved all the actors they were using, which I got to work with two of them again, because they’re really keen on theater actors, Alex and Kelly. So they just basically sent a message through my agent just offering me this and saying, ‘We’re big fans and will you watch our movie and will you consider doing this?’

“And I just leapt at it,” she says.

They still keep in touch and speak often. Okonedo’s looking forward to seeing them again in Berlin with their two babies; the youngest appears in the film. “Their little boy is in the movie. That baby is their baby,” she says, her eyes dancing with delight.

Making a low-budget, independent movie requires one and all to chip in and help. “So we were all babysitting and doing all sorts of things and staying at Airbnb, so it was very communal. And when I say low budget, not like low budget where they pretend it’s low budget, it really f****** was low budget,” she declares in a theatrical manner that leaves us both cracking up.

They rented local Airbnbs in Little Rock, where O’Sullivan grew up, and walked to work.

Okonedo has been on countless sets, but this one was kinda special because they were in the writer’s hometown. “She knew it back to front. And so that was her whole upbringing. And the places where we shot were all the things that she remembers from growing up.

“We were very light and it was a tiny crew and they were just rolling all the time doing stuff,” she says, pausing to come up with the right words to describe the experience of their being no set to speak of.

She opts for: “It was very unset.”

Then adds: ”There wasn’t a kind of set. It wasn’t like any sort of formula of filmmaking.” However, it was her favourite type of filmmaking “because it was just so messy and creative and stuff” and then they would be “trying to mess up the scenes and then put them back together again and then mess them up again, and we did have a lot of input.”

I ask her if there’s more freedom in making films that way as opposed to the big industrial scale blockbusters?

On the whole, her preference is smaller scale, she says, “especially now at my age, I’m just looking to do more stuff like this all the time. I just want to have that sort of freedom. I mean, you can’t always have that sort of freedom.”

However, she has an admiration for the kind of stars that hold up franchise movies. “I really have to congratulate actors that can still be so true and look so true in those great big blockbusters because I think it’s quite hard to retain that sense of spontaneity. And I’m not sure that I’m that good at it. And when I see people who can do it, and also saying words that are just pretty meaningless and still make it look kind of real. I’m like, that’s impressive. So it’s much easier when you’ve got great scripts, much easier.”

My mind keeps wandering back to how she was able to convey the unimaginable heartache her character has to face, and I gently ask her how on earth she prepared herself for that.

“I don’t really prepare,” she says bluntly. “I just understand where the person’s starting from. I’m always interested in the starting point of the film, how she got to be where she is now. And then I try not to think too much ahead of where the film takes you,” she says, sighing.

The fiercely intelligent actor looks me straight in the eye, sighs again, and insists: “I’m really, really not intellectual. I’m not. I can’t even put it into words. I’m just not … “

People have such a wrong impression of her, she says. “Often when I meet people the first time, they’ve got this impression that I’m going to be very kind of intellectual and bookish, and I’m just not that person at all, and I’m not a very serious a person, but I played a lot of serious roles, and so people confuse it. And also, I think at one point in Wikipedia, it had that I went to Oxbridge, which I did not. And so I’d often go there and people would think I’d gone to Oxford and Cambridge,” she adds, dissolving into fits of giggles. 

“I left school at 15, so that was not the case,“ she adds.

 “I think people have just often put a lot onto me,” especially, she adds, with all the great and the good kind of characters she has portrayed on stage and screen of late. “I played much more heads of things and very heady sort of intellectual people. And also I like Shakespeare and people imagine that you have to have such a command of language and actually you have to know how to speak verse and that’s something that can be learned, but you don’t have to be an intellectual to speak Shakespeare at all,” she maintains

Before our conversation, I dug up a transcription from an interview we did over two decades ago, when she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in Hotel Rwanda where she spoke of the agony of conveying raw emotion.

“I mean, I absorb things,” she responds quietly now. “But not in a kind of maybe linear fashion. That’s why I avoid appearing as myself anywhere on those sorts of programs where you have to sort of be yourself,” although The Graham Norton Show is the exception.

She’s reticent about discussing her acting, but I persist in asking because I know her words can inspire young aspiring actors.

Relenting, Okonedo believes that the best way to prepare “is to sort of empty yourself, really. I mean, that’s what I do before I go on set. I just sort of empty myself of everything, and I don’t work myself up into any state.

“That’s not my way. I see people that do that, and that may really work for them, but that’s not my way. It’s more like I’m just a receiver, go on and receive, and then something just sort of happens,” she marvels.

She’s darned good with the silent treatment too. Okonedo’s silences on screen are golden. There’s a twenty-second moment in Mouse, again because of spoilers, I’m unable to tell you any background, but she gives a single look that tells us everything, and more, about what’s going on.

What is the art of silence, I ask her? “I tell you where I can answer that, is that often the biggest thing I’m often doing when I get a script is asking them to cut my lines. That’s often what I’m asking for. Normally, there are maybe two scenes that I just kept suggesting cuts, which I can take or leave…Sometimes I feel like you can just think it and you don’t really need to say everything.”

Back in December, Okonedo wrapped on Clarissa, also starring David Oyelowo, India Amarteifio, Ayo Edebiri, Toheeb Jimoh, and Nikki Amaka-Bird.

It’s a film based on Virginia Woolf’s 1920s novel Mrs. Dallaway, but in this instance, the picture directed by twin siblings Arie Esiri and Chukwu Esiri, is set in contemporary Lagos.

“It’s exactly the same story,” she says, where she plays Clarissa Dallaway, a Nigerian society woman who drives around the city preparing for a party and getting her house ready. As she goes about her day, the titular character reflects back on her life, wondering whether she’d made the right choices.

There’s a parallel story about a shell-shocked World War One veteran, here reinterpreted as a soldier who’s come from the Northern Wars involving the Boko Haram, “and he’s in a sort of state from something he’s witnessed there,” Okonedo explains. The film was recently acquired by Neon.

Also coming up is the J.J. Abrams blockbuster The Great Beyond with Glenn Powell, Emma Mackey, and Jenna Ortega.

Is she allowed to tell us anything about her role and the film, I venture? “Probably not,” she chuckles. “But I am very tough. And I might be able to fight.”

Can’t be fiercer than Ingrid Tearney, the spy-boss and nemesis of Kristin Scott Thomas’s Diana Taverner, she played in Apple’s sublime Slow Horses.

Okonedo was only booked for the season she did because the Tearney character doesn’t really pop up much later on in Mick Herron’s Slough House book series, featuring Jackson Lamb, brilliantly captured by Gary Oldman.

However, the utterly ruthless Tearney does make a memorable appearance in Herron’s stand-alone thriller novel Nobody Walks. 

Her eyes light up when she mentions the title, and I know what she’s thinking. “It’s more about her. And I would love it if they just asked me to come back and do that,” she reasons.

“I would come back in a snap for Slow Horses. I had the best time doing it. It was a proper grown-up production,” she says.

When I interviewed Dame Kristin last year, she had adoring things to say about Okonedo. 

“We were at the ballet the other week,” Okonedo remarks nonchalantly.

They saw Akram Khan’s Giselle at the London Coliseum.

Bitter rivals on screen, I say. “Yes, but in real life, perhaps we might go to the ballet together.”

Stage is her passion. There are discussions, she says, about the possibility of her appearing in two separate productions over the next year or so. “If they come off, that will be fairly good,” she teases.

Last time Okonedo was in Berlin was with Annie Baker’s debut feature Janet Planet and they managed to slope off to see a play. For this visit, she intends to watch as many films as she can fit in.

She likes the early morning screenings best.