TheThe olly Adefope isn’t really sold in paranormal activity. We are in her South London sitting room discussing the second series of messy comedies on the BBC ghosts, In which she plays the naive (and extremely dead) Georgian nobleman, Kitty, who is one of a gang of spirits who terrorizes a young couple who unexpectedly inherited a pile of country. But for real souls? “I’ve never seen one before,” she says. “I’ve talked about it with the rest of the cast – I think if a skeptic saw something, I’d believe them 100%. But I think shows like Most Haunted are fake.” Even the sudden and frightening disappearance of a wheelie box from outside the Adefope window is not enough to sway it. “Maybe it was a neighbor?”
The mastermind of the team behind CBBC Awesome dateGhosts are unlikely to convince you that the spirit world exists either, but their cast of ghosts – including the flowered romantic poet Thomas and Julian, the shameful Conservative party member who perished wearing his pants around his ankles – will at least make you laugh. As silly as it sounds, the show has challenges for Adefope, not the least of which are the “four or five layers” she should wear to the set. “There are a lot of skirts and petticoats and a corset, so I’m so heavy,” she explains. “At least there’s heating now – they didn’t have any heating during the first series, so it felt like you were in a haunted house.”
Ghosts aren’t the only place you may have spotted an actor and comedian character. She spent more than five years on TV more than twice that time. In addition to Kitty, there was the disinterested reporter Ruth Dogan in this time With Alan Partridge, As well as the main parts in two American comedies, Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi’s fictional epic Miracle Workers and Intense, A smart, body positivity series based on the diary of journalist Lindy West. She has supporting roles in Proverbs State Let’s Flats And comedian Josh Widdecombe, and have appeared on Taskmaster and QI. She wrote and starred in her short film Sorry, for the BBC, and she even got a small role in it Mission Impossible: Fallout, I spent one day on set with Tom Cruise. (“The hairdresser looked at me and said,” Doesn’t she look great, “then Tom said,” Yeah, she looks great “- I’ll always be grateful to her.)
Although Adefope’s rise seems fast, she’s been working on it for a while. Born in southeast London, Ololade Adefope has been a passionate performer from a young age, although she wasn’t sure how this would translate into a career. “I wanted to do comedies, but I didn’t grow up and I wanted to be a standup,” she says. “Maybe because standing up seemed like something white men do. What attracted me most was the comedian and people like Catherine Tate and Olivia Coleman. People make funny voices and accents.” Studying drama at university seemed like a step in the right direction, but her parents weren’t sold off (“they’re Nigerian” laughs), so she chose English instead.
After graduation, a drama teacher turned her down and took a desk job that she described as “painful”. Things changed drastically when I started going to the edge of Edinburgh. Her eyes light up as she describes the setting, “summer camp” where caricatures from all over the world gather. She quit her job and took a diving or swimming trip to attend the festival. It was the comic creativity that featured Adefope as one to watch around 2015 GemmaA terrifyingly deceived young comedian with a broad northern accent (“Me Angry“I thought I’d be too weak on stage to stand up,” she explains. “I didn’t want to get up there and say, ‘That’s me.’ I want you to love me. So I was like, I’m going to do a character, so we’re on the same team. ”
Gemma led to her first gala show, “Lolly”, a mock talent contest billed as an opportunity for Adefope to “[masquerade her] Deep-rooted concerns as a personal comedy. ”Despite the overwhelmingly positive reviews, there was something bothering Adefope. Some critics believed that she talked about sweat a lot, others just not enough. Her second show, Lolly 2, was in response to both criticisms. Characters included the movie “Black Hermione,” a deceptive tongue that imagines Adefope’s experience of playing the Harry Potter character, based on her own experience choosing a nightmare.
“I auditioned for a very big BBC program,” she explains. I did, then they came out and gave me a new script and said, “We would like you to do it in an ‘African’ accent. I was not so confident as to say now: I will not do it; I just started acting. “
As and when, gently comedy is used on the Internet to denote the absurdity of race in the UK. I asked her when she had tweeted, “Someone dreams of a white Christmas” in response to the 2018 Charity Party group that didn’t include any color cartoons. While she says she regrets having entered into discussions on Twitter about this, which is inevitably by the Daily Mail in “ethnic conflict,” she will repeat the joke again. “If any white comedian said that, there wouldn’t be anything, it wouldn’t be a story,” she says. Besides, she adds, “I wasn’t really commenting on that gig, because obviously if that was the case [been] 12 black people in lineup that wouldn’t mean the comedy was static. It is much larger than the individual. “
Just as Adefope was finding her feet in British comedy, America came calling. In a suitably dreaded set of circumstances, the next day she was told that there was a problem on her flight home from New York and that she would have to extend her trip, she was asked to fill out a form to read the Miracle Workers. Two days later, she was cast on the show as “eyerolly” Rosie, the personal assistant to the deeply unperturbed god Buscemi, as she was preparing to move to Atlanta. On the set, she bonded with fellow Londoner Radcliffe. “He’s very famous for being an angel,” she says about her co-worker, who introduced her to the Cardi B business and who in turn bought the cast hats adorned with the rapper Bodak Yellow’s song “I’m Making Cash From Moves.”
Screaming ensued, with Adefope putting plans for Lolly 3 to wait to play Fran, the quirky best friend of the main character Annie (Saturday Night Live’s Aidy Bryant) and bearer of the show’s best streaks (“I masturbate with taste and frugality”). She says Fran is “more confident” than she is. “She just knows everyone loves her. She’s a very strong character to play with. It’s not extreme to believe in yourself and think you’re cool. It sounds like a radical idea, but it does what we all have to do.”
While she has enjoyed the downtime shutdown she offered, Adefope is keen to get back into action, and hopes to take the time to build more of her work. “A lot of people act as if it is their God-given right to be overpaid on TV, but it seems there has to be a level of admiration:” This is an exciting thing to do. “It’s not just something we owe.”
The universe might continue to shine on her – and maybe return her box for a while.
The second series of ghosts begins tonight, 8.30pm, BBC One
