Noma Dumezweni is usually the one who has already decided: the doctor, the lawyer, the queen. The stage gave her a stillness that survives any amount of digital water; the screen has yet to give her a part her own size.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the first episode of Best Interests (2023) and notice who is doing the talking. Marnie's doctors have concluded that keeping her alive is no longer the kind thing, and Samantha, played by Noma Dumezweni, is the one who says so, in a small room with a box of tissues on the table. She does not raise her voice and she does not lower it either. Sharon Horgan and Michael Sheen get the series, and deserve it, but it is Dumezweni's doctor who sets the whole thing moving, and she has decided before we meet her.
That is her screen work in one scene. She is cast as doctors, lawyers, judges and queens, the person with the authority and the bad news, and she plays them with a precision that comes from the stage. She had no drama school; she came up through youth theatre workshops, fringe and pub theatre, then the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the voice and the stillness were built there. Her early television was guest spots, nurses and receptionists, the woman behind a desk. By her own account the parts have changed: "I feel as if I've proved my mettle, they're more highfalutin now."
The turn came on stage. She stepped into the lead in Linda at the Royal Court in 2015 at short notice, and the next year originated the adult Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for John Tiffany, which brought her the kind of attention few stage actors get. The screen followed, and it followed with status: Miss Penny Farthing in Mary Poppins Returns (2018) for Rob Marshall, the defence attorney Haley Fitzgerald in The Undoing (2020), The Watcher (2022), and Marshall again for The Little Mermaid (2023), where she plays a queen written for the film. We found some dry warmth in her there, a mother who wants her son kept off the water, in a film we thought afraid to change anything else.
What works is the economy. In a crowded frame, with a crab and a computer-generated ocean competing for attention, she is the person you can hear. What has not yet happened is the screen giving her the space the stage does. The roles are still supporting, and still in stories that belong to somebody else, usually somebody white, a point made in more than one profile of her. We will own that we dreaded the tissues room every time Best Interests went back to it, and the reason was her: Samantha is sorry for the parents without being sorry for the decision, and Dumezweni lets both be true at once without asking us to like her for it.
Linda and Hermione showed the lead is in her. Someone should write her a film in which she is the one being told.
Biography
Noma Dumezweni is a British actress born on 28 July 1969 in Swaziland (now Eswatini) to South African parents. She moved to England as a child and began her career in theatre.
She won Laurence Olivier Awards for Best Performance in a Supporting Role in a Play for her work as Ruth Younger in A Raisin in the Sun (2006) and as Hermione Granger in the original West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (2017); she reprised the latter role on Broadway and received a Tony Award nomination. Her screen credits include Mary Poppins Returns (2018) as Miss Penny Farthing and The Little Mermaid (2023) as The Queen.
