Interview: Clare Anyiam-Osigwe

INTERVIEW: CLARE ANYIAM-OSIGWE.

FILM DIRECTOR & ACTRESS.

For those who may not know you could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

My name is Clare Anyiam-Osigwe and I am quite a lot of things. I guess I started as a Drama TV graduate who was a part-time makeup artist working at the Body Shop and Bobbi Brown, then after I graduated I was a working actress so I started doing parts on TV for ITV and Sky. I realised quickly, I carried on training I went to Lamda and Identity drama school, it didn’t matter how much you trained it was really about who you know and whether you were cast-able. So I just thought I can either starve eating

beans on toast for the rest of my life or actually I can use some of my other skills

Clare created her own skin care line called premae the world’s first allergen beauty company using vegan friendly ingredients which has been nominated for numerous awards

What’s the inspiration behind your practice?

Being a brown skinned black girl, I’m African-Nigerian but London born and there just wasn’t that many stories 12 years ago that we were predominantly featured in, if

you think about Eastenders or the Bill, well up into Hollywood Blockbusters, where are the British Black afro Caribbean actresses? There’s always that tokenism whether it was Naomi Harris or Thandie Newton and it’s that one girl represents a generation. I don’t know what it is but I said to myself when I’m 32 I’m going to come back into the film business and I think not only was there no work for black girls or not enough work to go around there was the whole #MeToo thing in respect to me going to auditions where there would be predominantly male producers and casting directors.

I remember some vivid experiences where people were trying to take advantage of me in the sense of saying “We just thought about that scene and we just thought she just bares her breast, we would like you to just show your breasts“ and I was like a) it’s not in the script b) it’s not in the stage direction and c) it doesn’t actually make sense to the text like this is happening in the middle of a war zone, why would somebody just show their breast? That’s really odd. I walked out of that audition and not doing it. So that coupled with my colour and lack of diversity in film I was like I’m out but something just happened last year I got honoured by the queen for my services to dermatology and had achieved some of the goals I had set and I just felt like you know what Clare, mission accomplished but I was talking to one of my customers who became a friend of mine who was in deep distress and she told me a mutual friend of ours broke up with his girlfriend and told her all he offered her was good d*ck and conversation. He’s 32 and she’s 28 and it was almost like he thought she would be

grateful to him saying that, it’s so degrading. In her mind it was clear he would date and put a ring on women who were fair skinned but for dark skinned girls it was like good d*ck and conversation because him and his ex were engaged. So in my mind this was the inspiration behind my film, No Shade.

What are the challenges you face when discussing the topic of colourism?

Within 10 minutes of putting out the press release about the film I was called immediately by the BBC world services, this is breaking news, a group of pregnant women in Ghana are swallowing bleaching tablets to make sure that their unborn children will be born lighter skinned and I felt physically ill just hearing that. I think that kind of global response, one guy from Italy he’s black Ghanaian his girlfriend is Italian and she’s from the south and in the south you have darker skin so the northerner Italians call the southern Italians Africans even though they are Italian as a derogatory term because they are negro they are dark skinned and he’s like the level of colourism that’s not even in the black community that’s in the white community. I was like damn, that is kind of special.

What do you think we can do as a society to reduce colourism?

I think that the line that’s in my film “No shade is superior” I just think knowing that everyone is unique because for me it’s really about the fact that even my friends who are of mixed heritage or fair skinned its that unwanted fetishism of their colour and they

will say to me Clare I find it so disrespectful and degrading that men will talk to me more than say another woman because I am lighter than her. It’s that moment they discard my personality my achievements and who I am, so it goes two ways. It’s not about throwing a pity party for dark skin black women like “oh please just like us or treat us better because we’re dark” no, it’s just treat me like a human being because we’re a human race and I think that’s what’s really special when you can say everybody is on the same page lets just get to know each other regardless.