David Harewood: ‘If I had my breakdown in America, somebody would’ve shot me’

I just can’t understand how people vote against their own interests’.

That was probably the start of my breakdown,” says David Harewood, rubbing his hands up and down the top of his head.

Over the past 15 years, Harewood has shown that he actually can play anything: spies, superheroes, warlords.

“I was seeing my white peers get lead after lead after lead after lead, turning work down for bizarre reasons like they didn’t want to film in Bolton,” he says with a sigh.

“I guess I’m just lucky that there wasn’t a stray elbow or stray knee,” he says.

Harewood and Charles Edwards during rehearsals of ‘Best of Enemies’.

“You only have to look online and type in ‘Black mental illness, police’, and you just see people getting shot, people getting tasered, people being really violently restrained.

I think if I’d been doing that in America, somebody would have called the police and… f*** me, a large black man acting bizarrely.

I don’t think I’d have made it.”.

In the 2019 BBC documentary Psychosis and Me, which Harewood followed up this year with a memoir, Maybe I Don’t Belong Here, Harewood says that the breakdown made him a better actor.

The cast of ‘Best of Enemies’ rehearses.

“I turned it down at first,” says Harewood of James Graham’s play, which was inspired by the 2015 documentary of the same name and opens in less than a week.

“I just couldn’t see it.

It helped that the Sewell Report had just come out, a government-commissioned report which concluded that Britain does not have a problem with institutional racism, and in so doing denied Harewood’s lived experience – and that of millions of others.

“I saw how some of the Black people selling that were just talking garbage,” he says.

“And I didn’t think it was that much of a stretch that people who look like me would have those politics.

“Because I’m affable, charming, people like me… those lines coming out of my mouth is strange.

Maybe it’s important to understand the other side’s point of view – although sometimes I find that hard.

“Absolutely,” says Harewood.

I just can’t understand how people vote against their own interests.

“I had 80 quid in the bank when I got Homeland,” says Harewood.

And from being at my lowest ebb to winning an Emmy and going to the Golden Globes… it was literally from my lowest to my highest point.” He doesn’t think it would have happened if he had stayed in the UK.

“It’s just difficult to achieve in this country,” he says.

“There was one post-Homeland thing that I had to read for, and I just said ‘No, tell them to f*** off.

Why does he think the UK is so behind America.

“I think executives and audiences are very literal.

“When there’s a whole f***ing host of male role models in Marvel and DC,” says Harewood.

“It’s just ridiculous.”.

At the same time, you’ve got the American civil rights leader Frederick Douglas coming to London and people saying, ‘You’ve got to tone down your intelligence because people think Black people are like that.’ That stuff perpetuates.

Intelligent, strong Black people really get up people’s noses.

People really don’t like it.” And yet most people are in denial?

“He has done a lot of work to make amends – giving articles that he found in the house back to Barbados; running bursaries for local black school kids to go to college

Harewood’s great-great-great-great-grandparents were named Harewood by the people who enslaved them

The name Harewood, he says, “sits uncomfortably as I get older

I just can’t understand how people vote against their own interests’