Olivier Award-winner Anjana Vasan: ‘Shakespeare, Ibsen – I see myself in their work’

‘People can be quite selective about ‘authenticity’ in ­drama,” shrugs Anjana Vasan. “Nobody seems to mind if a prince of Denmark or a duke of ­Verona speaks like he went to Eton.” But she notes that more questions get asked when somebody with a different skin tone takes on roles in plays by Shakespeare and Ibsen. “People speak about the Western canon being so great that it can speak to anyone. Then they think it’s surprising that somebody like me can see themselves in that world.”

The 37-year-old – who won an Olivier Award last year for a heartrending turn as Stella in the Almeida Theatre’s production of A Streetcar Named Desire, and has received consecutive television Bafta nominations, for We Are Lady Parts (2023), a Channel 4 sitcom, and Black Mirror: Demon 79 (2024) – credits her childhood in Singapore’s melting-pot culture with her passion for diverse drama.

Born in Chennai (formerly Madras), India, in 1987 to Tamil Hindu parents, Vasan was just four years old when her family relocated to Singapore. “I know some people think of the city as shiny, super­ficial, all about finance,” says Vasan. “But that stuff was just background noise to me, because I was drawn to the city’s lively cultural scene. 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 the stage, doing Shakespeare, ­Harold Pinter, Caryl Churchill.”

Vasan was so in thrall to Singa­porean theatre that she planned to spend her career there. However, after getting a degree in theatre studies at the National University of Singapore, she failed to get a scholarship to stay on and landed on a master’s course in Cardiff in 2011 instead. “After spending most of my life in such a busy, high-rise urban environment, Cardiff was like an oasis,” she says. “When my teachers suggested I stay in the UK and see if I could get some parts, I decided to give it a shot.”

She immediately landed small roles with the National Theatre and the RSC, as well as on Channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat. It’s not hard to see what the casting directors saw – her intelligent emotional range beams from those satellite-dish eyes. She laughs: “They do take up quite a lot of the surface area of my face. Having big eyes makes it very difficult to lie, and when I’m filming, and the camera’s right up in my face, I feel like the audience can feel my every thought.”

Unusually, Vasan has been cast mostly in classical drama on stage and more often than not in com­edies on screen – “Crying on stage and goofing for the camera,” as she puts it. She played a witch in Kenneth Branagh’s Macbeth and was nominated for an Evening Standard Theatre Award for her role in A Doll’s House at the Lyric Hammersmith. Television audiences will have seen her as an unlikely assassin in the fourth series of Killing Eve, before she began starring as the Muslim feminist Amina in We Are Lady Parts and as a meek shopgirl-turned-demonic serial killer in Black Mirror: Demon 79.

Now back for a second series, the adorably anarchic We Are Lady Parts is written and directed by Nida Manzoor. Born in London and with Pakistani Muslim heritage, she was also raised in Singapore until she was 10. The sitcom stars Vasan as a sweet, nerdy, hijab-wearing biologist who ends up out of her comfort zone as the lead guitarist of a feminist Muslim punk band, described in a voice-over as “a confused mix of hash anthems and sour girl power – one part boredom and two parts identity crisis”. The women in the band are all struggling to find their voices without shedding their faith or being rej­ected by their community. There’s a gleeful comic rage in their original songs, such as the lovelorn Bashir with the Good Beard, and Voldemort Under My Headscarf, in which the women howl back at the fear they generate on the streets of London.

Vasan was already a singer-­songwriter – she released her first album in 2017 – but “identifying more with Amina’s folk guitar background”, she chuckles at the challenge of learning to strap on an electric guitar for the show. “I felt very villainous,” she says. “But Amina is quite a dainty, idiosyncratic character. She’s not cool. So it was fun finding out how she’d access that liberating punk spirit.”

Auditioning for the part, Vasan improvised and bit the head off a flower. “I think Amina’s 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 really moving in serious parts, but the more serious actors often couldn’t do comedy.”

Because the cast of We Are Lady Parts play all the songs you hear in the show, Vasan says they developed strong bonds. “We rehearsed and rehearsed and ended up with the kind of chemistry that you can’t fake. Some of the songs are so fast that there’s no real space for ‘acting’, anyway, because we’re all playing so hard… I found myself really wanting the camera to zoom in on my fretboard to show that I’m really playing those solos!”

As a cultural Hindu who says she’s “not very spiritual”, did Vasan have any qualms about playing a Muslim character? “Yes,” she nods. “I had a very honest conversation with Nida, because the sitcom started as just a short film in 2018. When the series was commissioned, I didn’t have a sense of where the characters were going and I needed to ask Nida how much my character’s faith would play into the scenes.” Manzoor insisted that Vasan take the part, pointing out the common crossovers between culture and religion for most South Asian women. “Amina wears the hijab and she never wavers in her faith,” says Vasan. “But she’s also an individual on a musical journey from folk to punk, from anxiety to confidence, and that’s a journey I felt capable of charting.”

The only downside of the role is that it has resulted in Vasan receiving a slew of scripts about hijab-wearing women. She snorts: “Lazy casting! I have said no to other hijab parts that haven’t felt right for me.”

But she “absolutely relished” her rather different role in Demon 79, although she notes it was “disturbing” to think about the racism that her Indian character, Nida, faced in Charlie Brooker’s take on 1970s northern England. We see Nida struggling 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 the National Front skinheads who daub slogans on her front door.

It’s ironic that it is an era in which everything – from the uniforms of the shop’s staff to everyone’s interior decor – is brown, yet her brown skin is so unwelcome. The horror takes a darkly comic turn when she accidentally conjures a demon, Gaap, who appears in the form of Bobby Farrell, the front­man of Boney M (played by Paapa Essi­edu), who tells her that she must commit a series of brutal murders to prevent an imminent apocalypse.

Vasan points out that although Demon 79 is set in the past, it constantly looks to the future: “I think that these things [political movements and tensions] move in cycles. When you watch the news, it’s hard not to worry about where we are heading. 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 as horrendous as his.” Vasan shakes her head and closes her beautiful big eyes. “We like to believe we’re past it, but we’re never very far away from hurtling towards destruction.”

We Are Lady Parts returns on Channel 4 on May 30

Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 3 months with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.