In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, O-T Fagbenle
In Always Great, Awards Insider speaks with Hollywood’s greatest undersung actors in career-spanning conversations. In this installment, O-T Fagbenle looks back on how his career exploded while starring on six seasons of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the breakthroughs (and setbacks) that led to it.
It’s not just The Handmaid’s Tale fans who were waiting six seasons for Luke (O-T Fagbenle) to say, “This is my turn.” After being rescued by June (Elisabeth Moss) from No Man’s Land, Luke makes clear to his wife in the final season’s fourth episode that his decision to take action against the Gilead regime and join the Mayday resistance group was not a one-off. He’s spent nearly the entirety of the show watching June risk death to try and rescue their daughter, Hannah, and take the bad guys down. He feels determined to step in now and is prepared for the consequences—and Fagbenle, for his part, was relieved by his character’s evolution.
“The chagrin of Luke is watching his inaction, and it’s very frustrating for audience members seeing him be this cardigan-wearing passive guy while so much is going on—and I guess, for a while, it was tempting for me to be frustrated as well,” the actor says. “This is the season where he’s going to take matters into his own hands. The only way Luke could get there was to make peace with the fact that he might die doing this. That excited me.”
An alum of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Fagbenle has appeared in dozens of TV shows, but never for as long as on The Handmaid’s Tale. His career has transformed in the time he’s been on the Emmy-winning series, going on to star opposite the likes of Viola Davis and Jake Gyllenhaal while always returning to a project that’s come to feel like home. Coming off of this last season of Handmaid’s Tale, playing Luke came to feel disarmingly second-nature. “I have real memories of a decade ago, of stowing away on a ship or being shot or seeing my kid dragged away,” he says. “It’s a very strange feeling to have actually lived through something in front of the camera.”
Fagbenle rose in his native UK as a theater actor long before getting his substantial break onscreen. He performed in major Shakespeare productions as a teenager and generated international acclaim for his turn as Mercutio in a Romeo & Juliet tour in his early 20s. He started getting cast in notable films and series a few years later; after starring opposite Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd in Amy Heckerling’s 2007 rom-com I Could Never Be Your Woman, he decided to make a go of an American screen-acting career. He guest-starred on the Courteney Cox dramedy Dirt, the TBS sitcom My Boys, and a Michael Strahan comedy on Fox that was swiftly canceled. The guy known for his chameleonic stage presence back home was landing jobs in Hollywood, to be sure, without exactly getting to show his stuff.
“I actually had a really great hit rate—I put a lot of work into every single audition,” Fagbenle says. But when he turned 30, he decided to reach higher and stop putting himself up for guest roles. “I was, like, ‘Right, this is my time. I’m going to go get the big part,’” he says. “I auditioned for a year—and I think I did almost a hundred auditions without even a callback.” He simultaneously suffered a bad burning accident in his kitchen, hurting his face and chest; then he climbed a mountain in the Mojave Desert with a friend and had a “psychedelic experience” that gave him perspective. He asked himself: “Do I want to keep pursuing this thing that doesn’t look like it’s going to happen?” He found an answer. He packed his bags and moved back to London.
“I did a small play in a tiny theater where there were nights where there were more people on stage than there were in the audience,” he says of his return home. He felt better than he had in years. And then, naturally, the offers started coming in—from back across the Atlantic.
Fagbenle first caught my eye in HBO’s Looking, the intimate portrait of a group of gay friends in contemporary San Francisco. He played Frank, the put-upon long-term boyfriend of Agustín (Frankie J. Alvarez), a volatile and damaged budding artist. It came around because Fagbenle had made an impression on the director Andrew Haigh years earlier while auditioning for his 2011 feature, Weekend. Fagbenle was in the final two to play one of the lead roles but dropped out to pursue a safer opportunity. “I have very few regrets in my career, and not taking part in that is probably one of them,” Fagbenle says. But though Haigh soared after Weekend, now considered a current queer classic, he did not forget Fagbenle.
A good thing, too: Fagbenle’s Looking performance was sweet, toasty, and patient; he conveyed an effortless sexual freedom and emotional intelligence. “Frank is just in me, and he was in me 5 years and 10 years before I ever did Looking,” Fagbenle says. “It was more an exploration of that part of me, whether it’s physical or vocal. It was a real explorative time, and I loved him and miss getting to play him. Andrew, if you’re listening, we’ll come back. We’ll do it again.” The show ran for two seasons before wrapping up with a finale movie for HBO, in which Fagbenle made a brief appearance.
The Handmaid’s Tale began shortly thereafter, and Fagbenle received his first Emmy nod for the show. The time commitment hardly circumscribed him; his career blossomed around the blockbuster drama, making good on his career beginnings on the London stage by never doing the same thing twice. Well, except Looking did represent one troubling pattern: “I was a professional boyfriend,” Fagbenle says with a laugh. “I went through something like 20 shows in a row where I had to make out with someone.” (Most recently, he was a charmer as Michaela Jaé Rodriguez’s love interest on Loot.) He started taking control of his own fate, too, after watching Quentin Tarantino point out at an awards-season roundtable that, with technology today, most anyone can try making their own film: “I was, like, ‘Fuck you, Tarantino, calling me out!’” He took the note, making his own low films, and eventually his own TV show: Maxx, a well-reviewed comedy about a washed-up boy band star vying for a comeback. He’s got a few other projects in development now.
Fagbenle has started getting meatier offers, too. Susanne Bier asked him to play former president Barack Obama opposite Viola Davis’s Michelle Obama in The First Lady, which remains the hardest job of his career. “This wave of excitement and exhilaration then becomes this crash of dread as the reality of an almost Sisyphean, Herculean task is put ahead of you,” he says. “We know Obama. We know how he walks, we know what his jump shot looks like. It was a crushing pressure to play him.” Did he feel like he pulled it off? Fagbenle demurs: “It was challenging, particularly vocally because there was quite a lot of improvisation in that show.” What did he make of the show’s muted reception and eventual cancellation? Again, he demurs: “It’s somewhat of a mystery to me of what makes something successful or not successful,” he says. “As much as I can not let my sense of self-worth or happiness be too tethered to the success of any show, it’s hard to do.”
Fortunately, this awards season is filled with hits for Fagbenle. Last summer, he chewed the scenery alongside Peter Sarsgaard as ruthlessly ambitious DAs in Presumed Innocent, the hit legal drama helmed by David E. Kelley and starring Gyllenhaal. This is a complement because each performance in the show is dialed to 100—it’s the whole juicy appeal. “I seriously wondered on day one whether someone would just take me aside and be, like, ‘Why are you talking like that? Can you stop?’” Fagbenle says. Instead, he saw Sarsgaard digging in even more. “The stuff that was left on the cutting room floor—he would just do insane things. You would read the scene and you’d be, like, ‘Oh, this is how it’s going to be played. Everybody in that cast is a theater actor, and the court is a type of theater, so there was this meta thing going on.”
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