![]() Photograph: Helen Williams/BBC/Snowed-In ProductionsĪs in The Last Tree, his character is Yoruba, a West African ethnic group numbering 42 million globally, more than 100,000 of whom are in the UK, including Adewunmi’s family. Yetunde Oduwole as Abebi (left) and Bukky Bakray as Bless. “I’m just a young guy from Camden Town, but there’s a massive responsibility on all of us to acknowledge that people’s minds are shaped by what they watch,” he says of the responsibility of programme-makers. “But that’s not what’s important about the work.”Īdewunmi is in practically every scene in the show, charged with overcoming both the jury and – perhaps – the viewers’ preconceptions about the accused. “You’re constantly reminded that everyone’s gonna be watching,” he says. “Much bigger sets and a fantasy, all very different to The Last Tree.” He says the relatively smaller scope of You Don’t Know Me was a welcome return to the sort of character work that truly excites him, although he felt the pressure of leading a primetime drama. “It was much bigger budget than anything I’d ever done,” he says. He also starred in “punk rock thriller” The Watch, an ambitious TV take on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Now 27, Adewunmi’s breakthrough came in the 2019 film The Last Tree (directed by Shola Amoo), a tender coming-of-age story of a young British-Nigerian boy growing up in Lincolnshire, London and Lagos. It feels appropriate, however: Hero (a tour de force from Adewunmi) is just one of the thousands of young men who find themselves at the sharp end of the justice system every year.īeyond its accomplished exploration of racial prejudice in that system (it brings to mind the early episodes of HBO’s The Night of, starring Riz Ahmed), the show also highlights much young Black British talent. That the protagonist is nameless only adds to the ambiguity. The question of why key elements of his defence have been left to the concluding statement lingers over proceedings. The audience, like the jury, is left to decide whether his motives – and indeed the characters he describes – are genuine, or the fabrications of a desperate man. The complexity of the show lies in the subjectivity of Hero’s account. Given that, as a group, men like Hero are nine times more likely to be locked up in England and Wales than their white peers, the ensuing lack of sympathy from the judge, jury and gallery is unsurprising. ” That the speech is potentially Hero’s final act as a free man not only heightens the tension but serves as a reminder that the courts are where we tend to see young Black people penalised, rather than given a chance to communicate. ![]() “Lives are more than a collection of unfortunate circumstances, and we shouldn’t infer too much. “ carried a real moral authority,” says Edge. The show plays out in flashback, as Hero recounts the events leading up to his arrest, his courtroom address acting as a useful framing device and a comment on how the British justice system works – and whose interests it serves. ![]() “This is a world full of characters with intelligence and a capacity to work hard whose lives are squandered.” “There’s this vein of anger in Imran as he writes it,” says Edge. The series is based on a novel by the criminal barrister Imran Mahmood and was adapted by Vigil writer Tom Edge. In relaying his version of events to the court, he hopes to overcome what facts and evidence, both circumstantial and forensic, have suggested – and to avoid a life sentence. On trial for murder, the hitherto law-abiding car salesman looks out at the jury and – in a desperate plea for their sympathy and mercy – begins to tell his story. The four-part series opens with Adewunmi’s character, identified only as Hero, in the dock. I thought, this is a really interesting guy – his dignity, his identity, his morality – and the story was told from his perspective.” “It had so many Black characters at the forefront.” Once he clarified that the show was set in London (albeit filmed in Birmingham) it was “a must-have role. “It didn’t strike me as something that would air during primetime on the BBC,” he says. W hen he first read the script for You Don’t Know Me, Samuel Adewunmi assumed that the TV drama was set in the US.
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