If you haven’t read Glamour UK’s March cover story on Wunmi Mosaku yet, close whatever tab you have open and go find it. We’ll wait.
Because this one matters.
Glamour didn’t just hand Wunmi a cover because she’s having a moment. They handed her a cover because twenty years of quiet, principled, borderline stubborn commitment to the craft has finally collided with a role and a film, big enough for the world to pay attention. Sinners has 16 Oscar nominations. Wunmi has a BAFTA on her shelf and a Best Supporting Actress nomination on the table. And she is doing all of this while heavily pregnant, crossing time zones on barely any sleep, and apparently trying to move a door in her house at 3am (more on that later).
The piece is warm, honest and refreshingly unstarry. We meet her over high tea at The Chancery Rosewood in a Savage x Fenty hoodie, mini Afro out, no makeup; a deliberate exhale between red carpets. And from the jump, the interview has a different energy to the usual awards season profile. This isn’t a woman performing gratitude. This is a woman who genuinely sees the bigger picture.
The Role That Was Always Hers
Ryan Coogler didn’t just cast Wunmi in Sinners, he wrote Annie with her in mind after watching her in We Own This City. He saw in her the kind of women who had shaped his own life. That detail alone tells you everything about the specificity of what she brings to a role. Annie, the hoodoo priestess at the film’s emotional centre, could have been a supporting character in the background of a vampire thriller. In Wunmi’s hands, she became as multiple critics have put it; the film’s beating heart.
What makes the Glamour interview so compelling is how deeply personal her connection to Annie turned out to be. Playing a woman rooted in Ifa tradition and ancestral wisdom sent Wunmi back to her own roots; she’s been relearning Yoruba, a language that was quietly discouraged at her Manchester school because, as she puts it, it wasn’t “cool to be Nigerian” in those corridors. Her name, Oluwunmi, translates to “God is attracting me”. Mosaku means “I run from death”. She didn’t need to reach far for Annie. Annie, in many ways, was already inside her.
The Journey Nobody Fast-Tracked
This is where the piece really earns its place. Because Wunmi’s story is not the kind that gets told enough in glossy magazines. She grew up on a council estate in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, the youngest of three daughters born to two PhD-holding Nigerian immigrants who still struggled to find work after moving to England. She was diagnosed with dyslexia as a teenager. She was the only Black girl in her year at RADA. She spent years playing police officers until she turned down a huge American series; more money than she could imagine, her words; because her gut said no.
Then she asked the universe for a 10-part HBO series. And got “Lovecraft Country”.
That’s not luck. That’s an almost alarming level of self-knowledge, built over two decades of doing the work without the headlines.
The BAFTA Night Nobody Should Gloss Over
The profile doesn’t shy away from what happened at the BAFTAs, and it’s right not to. The BBC’s failure to edit out a racial slur aired while Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage, cast a shadow over what should have been one of the most joyful nights of Wunmi’s career. She had to collect herself backstage after hearing it, then walk straight back out to receive her award.
She’s been clear that her upset is with the BBC, not with the individual involved. But the broader point stings: an institution that benefits enormously from the presence and talent of Black artists failed, in a very public and very preventable way, to protect them. Wunmi says it plainly; everyone who was impacted deserved the care to have it removed. Hard to argue with that.
On Motherhood, ADHD and Moving Doors at the Wrong Time
Here’s where the piece becomes genuinely joyful. Wunmi has ADHD, is raising a toddler, is expecting her second child, and is currently in the middle of having her house renovated because nesting mode has fully kicked in. She became, in her own words, fixated on moving a door. “Why was I trying to do that? It’s not the right time,” she laughs. She’s doing strength training to keep her bones “literally together” during pregnancy. She doesn’t wear makeup day-to-day because she can’t be bothered to take it off. She’s been doing self-affirmations since she was twelve; “I love you hair, I love you skin, I love you stretch marks” and she means every word of it.
This is what makes her such a compelling cover subject. There’s no performance of effortlessness. Just a real woman, at the top of her game, figuring it out in real time.
Glamour UK got this right. Not just the casting of Wunmi as a cover star, but the framing; giving her the space to be complex, spiritual, funny, exhausted, triumphant and unfinished all at once. This isn’t a victory lap profile. It’s a portrait of a woman in full.
Whether or not the Oscar comes on 15th March, Wunmi Mosaku has already done the thing she set out to do. She said it herself: this is the moment she spent 20 years building towards. The industry is just finally paying attention.
And honestly? It’s about time.
Wunmi Mosaku covers Glamour UK’s March 2026 issue. Read the full interview at glamourmagazine.co.uk
TEAM
Photographer: Ekua King
Stylist: Georgia Medley
Hair Stylist: Dionne Smith
Makeup Artist: Joy Adenuga
Nails: Tinu Bello
Set Design: Joshua Stovell
Set Assistant: Pablo Lopez Bueno
Production: RAW Production
Videographer: Nathaniel Rodriguez
Digi Tech: Louise Oates
Photographer’s Assistant: Stephen Elwyn
Stylist’s Assistant: Jack O’Neill
Stylist’s Assistant: Alice Dench
Seamstress: Ruth Moriarty