“It’s been a while since I’ve had a suit made for me and it’s a real difference,” says Lennie James. “I can see why fellas do it.” He’s not actually wearing a suit; he’s dressed almost anonymously casual when we meet. But in his new BBC drama Mr Loverman, James plays the kind of dapper, stately British Caribbean gent who’s seldom seen not sporting a well-tailored, well-accessorised outfit. It’s a change from how we’ve seen James most often over the past decade: raging and ragged across the post-apocalyptic landscape of The Walking Dead.
“In Walking Dead I literally wore the same costume for three years,” he complains. “Three years I wore the same trousers! Every time I’d show up I’d go: ‘Oh God, it’s these again.’ Then when I left the main show to go to the spin-off, the trousers came with me.”
Having appeared in 125 episodes of the hit franchise since 2010, James is now a recognisable figure in the US, where he mostly lives and works. He downplays his celebrity, though: “Some days I can walk around and absolutely no one pays any attention, and other days it’s every corner I turn I’m shaking hands with people, saying hello, taking selfies, just so I can get to the coffee shop and back.” But usually it’s disguise enough just to put on a hat and glasses, he says, as he has done today.
It wasn’t just the suits. Mr Loverman, adapted from the novel by Bernardine Evaristo, was also a chance for the 58-year-old James to return to his roots. It is not your typical Windrush-generation immigrant story, though: his character, Barrington “Barry” Walker, is a successful man on the surface – erudite, married with two grownup daughters, owner of several properties, enviable wardrobe, likes a drink but who doesn’t? – but he is also a closeted gay man, who has been in a secret relationship with his “best friend” Morris since their boyhood back in Antigua. “He wants to be looked at but he’s hiding,” says James of the character. Having kept his sexuality under wraps for so long, the story finds Barry hemmed in by his own double life and belatedly confronting the prospect of living as his true self.
“It’s not the obvious ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs’ story that has been told frequently,” says James, “and that’s one of the things I love about it.” Often there’s the impression that “everybody left the Caribbean for the same reason”, he says, “and in Mr Loverman, you realise that people left for very different reasons, that the opportunities here weren’t just financial”.
On the one hand, the story is a lively portrayal of British Caribbean family life, with all its generalities and particularities. There are big Sunday lunches with family and friends, and goat curry and gossip about relatives back home. There are London terraces decorated inside with cane furniture and tropical plants. There is reggae and rum and laughter, but also discrimination and hostility on the streets outside. James’s mother was from Trinidad, and died when he was 10. He never knew his father. Now he is playing a patriarch of his own father’s generation, which, along with the rest of the cast, meant reconnecting with their own upbringing.
At times it got absurd, he recalls. “At one point, there was a huge conversation that stopped filming because the camera needed to move in a way that we had to move a table to the side.” This wasn’t just any table; it was the coffee table in the front room. “The front room is sacred. The front room is often the place that is the most Caribbean. It’s the one with photographs of family back home as well as family here. It’s the one with plastic on the furniture. It’s the one where the booze is. There’s Jesus on the wall and Jim Reeves playing … we all, as children of Caribbean parents, had a memory of that room. And it will centre round a coffee table. So that coffee table can’t be off-centre.”
But the story doesn’t let this community off the hook for its attitudes towards homosexuality, which increasingly grate against a more permissive mainstream Britain. Barry’s wife Carmel (played by Sharon D Clarke) and her friends are part of a church group, whose faith-based intolerance is openly expressed at the dinner table. Meanwhile, Barry’s 17-year-old grandson and his white friends happily listen to homophobic Jamaican dancehall.
This is no fiction. Even as Jamaica has a thriving LGBTQ+ community, successful artists such as Beenie Man, Buju Banton and Vybz Kartel have all put out egregiously anti-gay music. Shabba Ranks, from whose hit song Mr Loverman ironically takes its title, once defended Banton’s homophobia on British TV show The Word by saying that those who forfeited the word of the Bible “deserve crucifixion”. Same-sex activity is still illegal in Jamaica, and was only made legal in Antigua and Barbuda in 2022 and in Trinidad and Tobago in 2018.
“I do think there is a conversation to have within our community that we’ve been putting off for a while, that we are ill at ease with having, and that still keeps people from being open in a way that they want to be with their friends and family,” says James, “and that’s a shame. You know, it’s 2024 for fuck’s sake.”
Homophobia is to some extent a cultural problem, James agrees. “And not solely to do with the church, but the Bible is often used to win arguments, to make arguments … It’s still a way that people, not just young men, not just young Black men, demean each other – through their sexuality, musically and for profit. It’s a decision we have to make about how we sell our culture and our identity around the world.”
Before his mother died, James grew up “steeped in the church”, he says. They went at least four times a week. “It was the centre of our world. So we didn’t talk about sex, let alone different forms of sex.” As he got older, though, he came to understand that there was often a disconnect in West Indian communities between how they thought about LGBTQ+ issues publicly and how they related it to people they knew. He talks of visiting Trinidad for the first time as a child, and the woman with a fruit stall on the way to his uncle’s house. “She was quite obviously a man presenting as a woman, and she was completely accepted within the community that she lived in, but people just didn’t talk about it.”
Coming from the UK, his first visit to the Caribbean was a revelation. “It was staggering to be somewhere where everybody looked like you, as opposed to what was my lived experience of, you know, being the Black boys at No 51.” That family connection was severed, though, when his mother died, and he and his brother went to live in a foster home in south London (an experience James translated into his 2000 film Storm Damage), though he reconnected in later life through a cousin. He wasn’t so disconnected he couldn’t get his tongue round the nuances of an Antiguan accent, which is closer to Jamaican than Trinidadian, he explains. Jamaican was what you mainly heard on the streets in south London growing up. “If my mum heard me speaking in the street dialect, she would be more angry than me having my south London accent. For her, it was: ‘That’s Jamaican and we’re Trinidadian, we don’t sound like that.’”
Family is the centre of his life now, he says. He has been with his wife Giselle since they were 18 and they have three grownup daughters. That was another way he could relate to his Mr Loverman character, he says. “Not just that he’s got daughters, but how much of him keeping his true self secret was his fear of losing his girls.” James conveys that fear palpably in a scene near the end of the series where Barry has a heart-to-heart with his youngest child. “The idea of his youngest daughter hating him is probably more than he could bear, and I understand that very much.”
As an actor he has always had a capacity for intense emotion: fear, sadness, trauma which often, as in The Walking Dead, erupt into volcanic rage. “I don’t know why that is,” he muses. “I’ve had relatively little trauma in my life. You know, I lost my mum, which was huge, but outside of that, I’ve been relatively lucky and unscathed.” He modestly talks about finding the truth of his characters, but some of those characters he has actually written for himself, such as the volatile father of a missing daughter he portrayed in his hit series Save Me. “I absolutely cannot blame anyone for that one,” he admits.
Just how effective he can be was brought home to him recently. “I bumped into a guy at a football game in Atlanta, of all places, who was a post-traumatic stress therapist. And part of the journey of post-traumatic stress therapy is to bring the person to a point where they can be frightened without it triggering their trauma.” To do that in a controlled environment, the therapist explained, he used episodes of The Walking Dead. “I just thought that was a beautiful circle.”
In person, he seems like a calm, thoughtful, empathetic guy – is it too glib to say acting is an outlet? He was an incredibly shy kid, he explains. “Between me and my brother, when we were growing up, if you said: ‘One of you is going to be an actor,’ 99% of people would have picked my brother over me.” He never particularly craved recognition, it seems, and would still rather hide under a hat and glasses than bask in the limelight a moment longer than he has to. “I’m very much a kind of homebody, having friends and family close by and around,” he says, “and I am very comfortable in my own company. So, yeah, I think the whole job is my outlet – so I can close the door and be quiet Lennie again.”
Mr Loverman is on BBC One and iPlayer from 14 October.
