Sope Dìrísù: ​‘Fear is a very dif­fi­cult sen­sa­tion to replicate’

You’ll have prob­a­bly seen the actor Sope Dìrísù in some­thing, as he’s cropped up here, there and every­where across the last decade. His extra­or­di­nary turn as Bol, an African refugee whose life gets even worse when he reach­es a safe­house in the UK, is at the heart of the Sun­dance-laud­ed hor­ror fea­ture, His House, which is released on Net­flix on 23 October.

LWLies: Has it been a hec­tic decade for you? And if so, has it been plea­sur­ably hectic?

Dìrísù: I don’t know, I haven’t had any­thing to com­pare it to, because I’m the only per­son in my fam­i­ly who’s in the indus­try, so I don’t have any­one close to me that I can look up to. I’ve made a lot of friends, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you if it was par­tic­u­lar­ly busy. I know that com­ing into it, every­one makes a big hoo-ha about how you’re prob­a­bly not going to work for­ev­er and you’re going to have to sup­ple­ment your income, but I’ve been real­ly blessed in being able to basi­cal­ly go from job to job. There have def­i­nite­ly been gaps and you do get wor­ried that you’re nev­er gonna work again, but I’ve nev­er felt over­whelmed by the amount of work that I’m doing.

Do you recall the first time you ever act­ed in pub­lic? What was it and who did you play?

The first time that I was sup­posed to act in pub­lic, and I got all the way to dress rehearsals, was meant to be as the star in the Nativ­i­ty play at school.

When you say star do you mean a star or the star?

I mean lit­er­al­ly the star that guid­ed the three wise men to the manger. I was just sup­posed to stand up in the hall with a foil star in a hula-hoop, and then walk across the stage. But I got appen­dici­tis so I couldn’t do it. I think my first mem­o­ry of per­form­ing would def­i­nite­ly still be a school play. I played like one of the ensem­ble in The Wiz­ard of Oz. That’s when I must have been 12. But I sup­pose I real­ly only got into act­ing in the first instance because I got into a new school, and I didn’t real­ly have any friends there and it was a way of sort of social­is­ing. I was just going to throw myself into as many extra-cur­ric­u­lar activ­i­ties as pos­si­ble. And act­ing was the one that stuck.

Were you aware how scary His House was going to be when you were mak­ing it? 

Some­times when you’re in it, you can’t real­ly see the wood for the trees. Because I feel the same thing about hor­ror films. The last thriller that scared me was What Lies Beneath, the Har­ri­son Ford film. The only rea­son it scared me is because I was like ten when I watched and I wasn’t able to go to the toi­let or the bath­room with­out parental super­vi­sion for about a week because I was wor­ried that some­one would be drowned in the bath when I got there. But I do strug­gle with hor­ror films because I find some of the scares pre­dictable, so it’s real­ly, real­ly warm­ing to hear that this film bangs in a dif­fer­ent way.

With the PTSD aspect of your char­ac­ter, how did you go about build­ing that trau­mat­ic his­to­ry in your head?

I sup­pose in terms of cre­at­ing a char­ac­ter, when you look at human beings or even your own life, every­thing that hap­pened to you before today forms who you are. So say like real­ly crass­ly if you’ve been hit by a car, the way you cross the road is mas­sive­ly dif­fer­ent to some­one who hasn’t. I think that it wasn’t too much to hold a lot of his expe­ri­ences in his head, and as I was break­ing down the script to be like, ​‘Yeah, but he’s been through a very par­tic­u­lar expe­ri­ence so how would that affect his response to the peo­ple around him.’ The notes on my script were real­ly thor­ough. Some­times I couldn’t see what the actu­al lines were.

Through Bol, we see many dif­fer­ent shades of fear. He’s kind of fear­ful in dif­fer­ent extremes and for dif­fer­ent things. Is fear a tough emo­tion to deal with as an actor?

I think fear is real­ly hard because it’s very dif­fi­cult to pre­dict how peo­ple are gonna respond when they’re stressed or scared. When you’re afraid, adren­a­line floods your sys­tem. That’s a very dif­fi­cult sen­sa­tion to repli­cate in an imag­ined cir­cum­stance. As an actor you’re being like, ​‘Oh, I heard a noise in that cor­ner,’ I would just switch a light on or I would just go to sleep or I’d just leave the house – there are cer­tain deci­sions that char­ac­ters make that human beings out­side of the sit­u­a­tion would be like, ​‘I would nev­er do that.’ Which is why we’re always scream­ing at the cin­e­ma screen, ​‘Don’t go in there! Don’t touch that!’ I sup­pose there is a real head­space you need to get into in the char­ac­ter to jus­ti­fy a lot of the deci­sions. So I do think that chan­nelling fear is dif­fi­cult, for sure.

Did you have any con­tact with any real refugees or did you do any deep research?

I wouldn’t have been too keen on get­ting peo­ple to relive their trau­ma for our art. There are a lot of pub­lished arti­cles and accounts of peo­ple who have made cross­ings or peo­ple who were held in deten­tion cen­tres, and I think we relied more on that. I’d also done a short film a few years ago with the direc­tor Stu­art Gatt called The Dead Sea and that was a sim­i­lar sto­ry about a Niger­ian cou­ple who had been liv­ing in Libya and, once Gaddafi had been top­pled, it became very hos­tile to for­eign nation­als so they need­ed to get out. The sto­ry focus­es on them in a deten­tion camp and, because of the speci­fici­ty of that sto­ry, we’d done a lot of research, and I was able to draw on the research we’d done for that film on this film. I see this as almost a pro­gres­sion of that story.