Gugu Mbatha-Raw is relishing the new, leading role ‘Surface’ offers her: “It took the noir damsel in distress trope and flipped on its head.”
describes the world of her new series,a noirish Apple TV+ drama about Sophie, a well-heeled British woman living a seemingly perfect life in San Francisco. There’s her handsome husband, James, played byAnd then there’s Sophie’s house, a spacious wonder bathed in ambient lighting, designed so beautifully thatis on its way right now, actually. But as the title suggests, underneath it all is a series of devastating secrets that are slowly rising to the fore.
“Even though they have seemingly everything—the Tesla, the amazing house, designer clothes—they’re not happy people,” Mbatha-Raw says of the show’s characters. “There’s a dark undercurrent festering underneath.” Mbatha-Raw tells me this delightedly over Zoom, in a hotel room in New York, between hasty bites of a flaky pain au chocolat. Though she’s a trained British actor with a penchant for dramatic fare, Mbatha-Raw is cheery by nature, chasing each shot of a sentence with a smile and, on occasion, a laugh that hits the ceiling. She’s like that even when she’s talking about her exploding schedule, or the jet lag currently settling into her bones. “My body is still waking me up at five,” she says.
“If my life was so perfect,” Sophie asks her therapist, “why did I try to end it?” It’s not until a detective comes along and warns her that her husband isn’t who he seems that Sophie’s suspicions are confirmed, setting her on a messy, scary journey to the truth. Mbatha-Raw plays Sophie as a woman who’s initially delicate and haunted, but becomes steelier with each passing episode. She beams her way through social events, hiding the fact that she’s cannily investigating everyone and getting closer to the truth. “I love the idea of Sophie herself being the mystery,” Mbatha-Raw says. “She’s trying to crack her past.”, Mbatha-Raw got the script years ago, well before Apple TV+ had even launched, she says.
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