Sinners made history as the most Oscar-nominated film of all time, and chances are very good it will pick up a good number of statuettes on March 15. One of Sinners‘ many contenders is Wunmi Mosaku, up for Best Supporting Actress for her wonderfully layered portrayal of Annie, the estranged wife of Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke and a Hoodoo practitioner who’s more tuned into the supernatural elements of the film than some of the other characters.
Speaking to Deadline in a group interview alongside director Ryan Coogler and her co-stars Jordan and Delroy Lindo (all Oscar nominees themselves), Mosaku praised Coogler’s Sinners script using one succinct word: “perfect.”
“I don’t think there was a scene that I didn’t think was going to work,” Mosaku said of the Best Original Screenplay nominee. “I read it, and I thought it was a perfect script. I felt all of the characters. I really loved all of the characters and cared about them.”
She was well familiar with the words on the page when Sinners began production, of course. But when she watched the movie, she was still taken aback by how certain elements translated to the screen.
“The scene that took me by surprise was the chain gang scene and the improvisation between Stack, Delta Slim, and Miles [Caton], and seeing the blues come out of that moment, it was so profound,” she said. “When I watched it, I was like, ‘Wow, was that in the script? I don’t remember that being in the script.’ And just being completely in awe of their openness and their flexibility and their reception to the emotion that was being built up in the scene and Ryan not calling, ‘Cut’ at the end of the monologue. It just took me by surprise, but the scene itself was perfect and then these moments of genius come through.”
On set, there was another spontaneous moment that affected her character directly. “There was another scene with Smoke and Annie in the shop when [Ryan] changed the second line from, ‘Why are you here, Smoke?’ to ‘Elijah, why are you here?’ And that was like, again, I thought it was a perfect script, a perfect scene, but then just calling him by his name broke the whole scene open to something else. It elevated the scene, it was just beautiful.”
Head to Deadline to read the full interview—including a funny extended discussion on which sweet treat stood in for garlic during a key vampire-adjacent scene.
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