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The actor has channelled Bob Dylan and received an honour at just 29. Now she’s finally ready for primetime
Sheila Atim would not call it a shrine, exactly, but in her London flat, there is a mantelpiece on which she has placed a few commemorative bits and bobs. There’s an Olivier award here, an MBE there. “My friend did say it looked like a shrine,” she admits, laughing. “But it’s not because I want people to walk into the flat and be blinded by the lights of Sheila’s achievements. These things are just nice! They’re little milestones. I look at them and go, whoa. What?!”
There’s a lovely, knockabout energy to Atim, balanced by a deeply serious side. More than almost anyone I’ve interviewed, she really, properly, thoroughly considers every angle of every question she is asked, as if she’s been set a puzzle to solve. Perhaps that’s why casting agents spot a kind of otherworldliness in her. “A little bit, not bang in the middle of the mainstream, just slightly to the left,” as she puts it. Atim has been a powerful presence in the theatre world: she won the Olivier in 2018 for her role in the Bob Dylan-inspired musical Girl From The North Country, and has done almost every interesting, just-slightly-to-the-left production of Shakespeare going. Then, in December, she was awarded the MBE – at the age of 29. Now she’s moving on to the small screen with a BBC primetime debut in which she’ll be playing a witch. In The Pale Horse, a list of names is found on the body of a woman who has been murdered; a man who finds his own name there becomes obsessed with a trio of spooky women in a leafy suburban village. It’s an Agatha Christie adaptation, which means Atim can’t tell me anything else about it. “It’s quite hard, isn’t it, with a whodunnit? But I am playing a witch. That much I can tell you.” Continue reading...