For British-Nigerian actress Sophie Okonedo, a film role turned into a homecoming. The Oscar nominee, who plays the title character in Clarissa, the Lagos-set reworking of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, says the project forced her to face a long gap between herself and her Nigerian roots, and sent her back to her father’s homeland for the first time in over 20 years.
Channels TV published her reflections on the production on November 12, 2026, drawing on what the actress said in a recent interview about the shoot.
A sticky area
Okonedo grew up in London, raised by her mother. Before cameras rolled in November and December 2025, she had not set foot in Nigeria for more than two decades. When the role came, she said, she raised her doubts directly with co-director Chuko Esiri.
She recalled telling him: "You know, I was estranged from my family there, and I don’t know if I really know Nigeria well enough." She went on: "It’s been a big gap. I didn’t grow up there and I was brought up by my mother, so it’s a sticky area for me. I don’t know how I’ll be able to do it."
According to Okonedo, the filmmaker’s answer was short and calming: "Don’t worry, if nothing else, we will bridge that for you."
No hotel, just mummy’s house
The Esiris kept that promise in a very homely way. Instead of a hotel room during the Lagos shoot, Okonedo stayed at the house belonging to the twins’ mother, an arrangement she says steadied her on and off set.
"I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to go on a sort of voyage here of discovery,’ and—I mean, I could get emotional talking about it—it lived up to that and more," she said. "I got very comfortable at Chuko’s mum’s house, and then for the filming, I just didn’t move into the hotel. I just stayed there the whole time."
The Lagos she no longer knew
Playing a wealthy Lagos hostess getting ready for an upscale party still demanded some cultural catching up. Okonedo travelled to Lagos ahead of the shoot and found a city very different from the one in her memory.
"I got a bit of a fright because I hadn’t been there for over 20 years," she said. "Even the Lagos that they are describing in the script wasn’t the Lagos that I remembered from when I was young. It’s changed so much, like these emerging cities do. I didn’t recognise it."
Mrs. Dalloway moves to Lagos and Abraka
Clarissa takes Woolf’s 1925 novel out of post-war London and resets it in present-day Lagos and Abraka in Delta State. Nigerian twins Arie and Chuko Esiri, the duo behind Eyimofe, wrote and directed it, and the story looks at the sheltered world of the country’s rich.
