Gugu Mbatha-Raw

Early career

Mbatha-Raw appeared as Octavia in Antony and Cleopatra in 2005 at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, and had one of her early dramatic breakthroughs later that year at the Royal Exchange in Romeo and Juliet, in which she starred opposite Andrew Garfield.^[11] For that role she was nominated for best actress by the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards.^[12] She next had minor roles on the television series Bad Girls (2006) and Marple (2007) before taking on a recurring role on Doctor Who in 2007. She played Tish Jones, the sister of Martha Jones, companion to the Tenth Doctor, in four episodes, most prominently in "The Lazarus Experiment". In 2009, Mbatha-Raw was cast as Ophelia in Hamlet on London's West End and Broadway, opposite Jude Law as Prince Hamlet.^[13] After seeing her in Hamlet, J. J. Abrams cast her in his 2010 television series Undercovers, which was cancelled after 13 episodes.^[14][15]

In June 2011, Mbatha-Raw was cast as the female lead on the Fox television series Touch, opposite Kiefer Sutherland.^[16] She had a supporting role in the romantic comedy Larry Crowne (2011), written and directed by Tom Hanks.^[17] She also was named one of 42 "Brits to Watch" by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.^[18]

2013–present

Mbatha-Raw garnered praise for her performance in Belle (2013), portraying Dido Elizabeth Belle, a mixed-race woman raised as a gentlewoman in 18th-century England.^[19][20] She won the Best Actress award and was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer at the British Independent Film Awards. She was also nominated for a Satellite Award for Best Actress.^{[citation needed]} In 2014, she spoke at the United Nations headquarters when the film was screened in honor of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.^[21] Later that year, Mbatha-Raw starred as a pop singer in the romantic drama Beyond the Lights, for which she earned a Best Actress nomination at the 2014 Gotham Awards.^[22]

In 2015, she was nominated for a BAFTA Rising Star Award and had a supporting role in the space opera Jupiter Ascending.^[23] She also played Prema Mutiso, the wife of a forensic neuropathologist who first discovered extensive brain damage in NFL players due to concussions, in the biopic Concussion alongside Will Smith.^[24] On stage, she portrayed the title role in Jessica Swale's play Nell Gwynn, about the actress who became the mistress of King Charles II of England; it ran at Shakespeare's Globe from 19 September to 17 October 2015.^[25] She was nominated for an Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for her performance.^[26]

In 2016, Mbatha-Raw was one of the two leads in "San Junipero", an episode of Black Mirror,^[27] and played a major supporting role in Miss Sloane, a drama about Washington lobbyists starring Jessica Chastain.^[28] In 2016, she starred opposite Matthew McConaughey in Free State of Jones, a biopic of farmer Newton Knight, a resister of the Confederacy. She played Knight's common-law wife, Rachel, a freedwoman he had a family with after the Civil War.^[29]

Mbatha-Raw was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours, for services to drama.^[30]

In 2017, she played Plumette in the live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, directed by Bill Condon and co-starring Emma Watson and Dan Stevens.^[31] In 2018, she starred in a number of science fiction features, including A Wrinkle in Time, directed by Ava DuVernay, and The Cloverfield Paradox.

She played Mary Seacole in a biopic of her life proposed in 2019 by Racing Green Pictures and producer Billy Peterson, intended for release in 2020.^[32]

In 2021 and 2023, she played Judge Ravonna Renslayer in the Disney+ series Loki.^[33][34] In 2022 and 2025, she starred in the Apple TV+ psychological thriller series Surface, on which she also served as an executive producer.^[35]

In 2021, Mbatha-Raw was appointed a global Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Since 2018, she has visited Burundian and Congolese refugees in Rwanda and Uganda as well as taken part in UNHCR's EveryOneCounts and Films of Hope campaigns.^[21][36] In 2021, she was one of the announcers of the Refugee Paralympic team.^[37] In November 2021, Mbatha-Raw was cast in the romantic film Nobody's Heart with Edgar Ramírez, directed by Isabel Coixet.^[38]

In 2024, she played the female lead in the Netflix action film Lift opposite Kevin Hart.^[39] The same year, it was announced that Mbatha-Raw would return to the Doctor Who universe as a new character in the spin-off series The War Between the Land and the Sea.^[40]

Film

Television

Theatre

Radio