#ive been watching the women of marvel lines for like MONTHS to see if crys or dusa got in but they never did

[maximusboltaqon]

ok im talking about marvel topps again THEY RELEASED A HEROINES SET AND NAHREES AND TONAJA ARE INCLUDEDDDD

im gonna be honest i have very little idea who these two even are but also. they're very minor INHUMANS being included in stuff!!!!!! WE'RE PUTTING INHUMANS IN THINGS AGAIN!!!!

[peckhampeculiar]

Jade’s journey

WITH A CAREER SPANNING TV, THEATRE AND FILM, ACTOR AND POET JADE ANOUKA CAN TURN HER HAND TO ANYTHING.

She talks about filming with Idris Elba, her one-woman show Heart and how she took hundreds of local youngsters for a night out at Peckhamplex

WORDS: EMMA FINAMORE; PHOTO: LIMA CHARLIE

Some people just seem made for storytelling, and the magnetic Jade Anouka – equal parts actor and poet – is most definitely one of them.

Now living in Camberwell – near her favourite brunch spot, Kurdish cafe Nandine on Vestry Road – Jade grew up in Bexley, later moving out to Dartford. She kept up her local connections though, going to secondary school in Lewisham, and it was here in south-east London she had her first proper break in acting.

Inspired by Saturday drama classes, a 17-year-old Jade entered a competition in the local paper and landed a week-long workshop at Greenwich Theatre. It ended with a production of the musical Golden Boy, alongside Olivier-nominated Jason Pennycooke – now in hit West End show Hamilton – and Sally Ann Triplett, whom Jade describes as a “musical theatre legend”.

“I was actually doing a project on her at school when I went to Greenwich Theatre,” she says. “Whenever I was in a play I enjoyed it so much, it would become my world. My parents could see it too, before I even knew I could do it as a job. I just loved it.”

It was a love she grabbed with both hands. Jade headed to the National Youth Theatre on a scholarship and then on to university, to Guildford School of Acting.

“It was a bit of a culture shock,” she remembers. “There were lots of people there who knew the whole ‘acting world’, they knew people’s names, they knew playwrights – and I didn’t know anything. I just liked messing about on stage.

“There were people there whose worlds were so different, who’d had totally different upbringings to me. So that was a bit of a shock. But I made mates for life, friends from different worlds, which is really good but also from the point of view of an actor – to be able to empathise and not be closed into your own world. It was amazing to meet an array of people and make friends.”

Despite once being told by her voice teacher she would “never do Shakespeare – I got completely slated for my voice”, Jade was hired immediately after graduating in 2007 by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she not only landed a spot in an internationally touring play but earned a postgraduate award in teaching Shakespeare.

She was hired by the RSC for a role in The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s twist on Homer’s epic The Iliad, focusing on a group of women who make just a brief appearance in his original. The all-female cast took the production to Atwood’s home country of Canada, where she came to see it, setting Jade up for a 14-month stint with the company.

Since then, she has taken the worlds of both stage and screen by storm – picking up numerous awards and accolades. In 2011, she received a commendation at the Ian Charleson Awards for her performance as Ophelia in Hamlet at the Globe, and in 2014 she won the Stage Award for Acting Excellence for her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe. She was also named among InStyle’s Bafta breakout stars for 2018.

A woman of many talents, Jade has landed television roles in Doctor Who, Chewing Gum, Stan Lee’s Lucky Man and Trauma. Earlier this year she appeared alongside Sheridan Smith in Cleaning Up, a six-part drama on ITV.

Her most recent adventure in television is alongside megastar Idris Elba in his Netflix comedy series Turn Up Charlie, based in London and Ibiza, in which he plays a down-on-his-luck DJ, while Jade is Tommi – a slick, successful sound engineer.

“That was so much fun, I’ve never worked so long on a comedy before. I’d done a bit on Chewing Gum but nothing like this,” she smiles. “And he [Elba] created such a great vibe on set, because he was producing it too. I loved the cast – Piper Perabo [of Coyote Ugly fame] is great, she’s so cool. We went to Ibiza to film too – I got the jammiest deal.

“Idris is great – he improvises a lot, so we’d finish the scene but then keep rolling. If it feels like something’s fizzing they’ll keep it going.”

She has fond memories of when the cameras switched off too. “Oh my God, I swam in that sea,” she laughs. “Everyone was there, cast, producers, crew... we all had a dip and I remember looking round and thinking, ‘This is mad! Work should not be this fun’. I was proper pinching myself.”

Jade had another pinching-herself moment in March, when her film Fisherman’s Friends hit the cinema screens and made the top four movies in the UK – behind only Dumbo, Captain Marvel and Us. It follows the story of 10 fishermen from Cornwall who get signed by Island Records and achieve a top-10 hit with their debut album of sea shanties.

Jade plays a key role in the story. “It’s a proper feel-good British film,” she explains. “I play the head of Island Records, who signs the fishermen, who is a real person in real life, but is a man.”

Gender-hopping in roles isn’t unusual for Jade, who despite proudly flying the flag for female actors – in Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Shakespeare trilogy at the Donmar Warehouse in 2016, for example – has played parts such as Henry IV’s Hotspur and Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, and has spoken previously about wanting to tackle James Bond.

“I was thinking about that the other day. And I also play roles on stage that are ‘male’ roles too. I kind of love that,” she smiles.

The idea of playing with identity feeds into her other life as a poet, in which she writes and performs verses, often exploring issues like gender and ‘otherness’.

Poetry has been with her since drama school and it was something she embraced on the road on acting jobs. “It was a way to be creative and be in control,” she explains. “When I couldn’t be in control in the acting world, I could be in control of my poems.”

In 2016 this led to her publishing a volume of verses – called Eggs On Toast – and last summer she gave a TEDx talk at Theatre Peckham on “being black, being a woman, being other”, featuring many of her own poems. Bounty, for example, explores the complexity of race and identity, with powerful, emotive lines.

“It ended up that the talk was going to be about identity,” Jade explains. “I knew I had to use poetry, because that’s how I can communicate with my voice best.”

She closed the talk with I Am A Woman – a powerful homage to Maya Angelou and her seminal poem Phenomenal Woman – peeling away societal expectations of femininity, getting to the root of what being a woman means to Jade.

What it means to be a woman of colour, and an actor, is also important to her, and it inspired a local event she organised last year called Black Panther Peckham.

“I love superhero films,” she explains. “I grew up obsessed with them, but there were so few black women. I was so disappointed with Halle Berry as Catwoman, because I love Halle Berry and thought it would be amazing... and then it was such a bad film. The script was just all wrong.

“So when I heard about [superhero film] Black Panther I thought, ‘Oh my God this would have been my absolute life when I was young’, and I just thought that people like my little cousins needed to watch it.”

Seeing Oscar-winner Viola Davis raising money in the US to send underprivileged young people to see the film, Jade sought to do something similar here in London. “We shouldn’t take it for granted that everyone can just afford to go to the cinema. Peckhamplex is obviously good anyway – £4.99, get in! – but even that for some people is a luxury. So I just started a GoFundMe page, and it went absolutely mental!”

Jade raised thousands of pounds for hundreds of local children to see Black Panther at Peckhamplex, with popcorn, drinks and Disney merchandise donated to the evening, along with a post-show Q&A for the young audience.

“It was so heartwarming,” she smiles. “It was so great that we could do it. I kept popping into the cinema and hearing the crowd’s reactions. There was something about a load of young people being in a room alone with their peers, that kind of shared experience, that was really special. They were having so much fun.”

Jade recently took another 140 young people from Peckham and other parts of south-east London to see the play Emilia in the West End. “I just thought it was so important for young people to see this production,” she says.

“The first of its kind with three women of colour in the lead and on the poster, in a play set in Shakespeare’s time about a forgotten, hidden story of a woman who found her voice. I was able to use some money left over from Black Panther Peckham to help make it happen.”

The second half of this year is set to be as action-packed as the first, with Jade appearing in A Black Actress – a photo exhibition celebrating black actresses that is set to open this summer. She will also appear alongside Blake Lively and Jude Law in The Rhythm Section, a big release hitting cinemas in November.

When we meet, she has just finished a run of her own one-woman show, Heart, at The Vaults under Waterloo Station, and it marks another branching-off in her creative life.

The 50-minute monologue is a journey of the heart, following a woman from her wedding day for the next seven years. “It’s a kind of call-to-arms, a call to look at society,” she explains.

“Really, again, it’s all about identity, and maybe feeling ‘other’. The idea of that and of heartache –where that sits you in society. It’s funny, but most people were crying at the end. They said they could recognise their own stories or moments in it.”

Opening on International Women’s Day with an all-female team made it all the more poignant, along with the fact that Jade was performing her own material in the setting of a play, rather than someone else’s script, or speaking poetry.

“It was different because it was my words,” she says. “There’s nothing to hide behind, but it was amazing. It was the start of a journey – I’m definitely going to do it again [Heart will be coming to a London theatre this autumn] and hopefully publish it. I just want it to live on, I want it to be told and told.”