Daniel Kaluuya’s Oscar speech in April 2021 included a line about his parents that made his mother’s face freeze on camera. He thanked them for having sex.
The moment went viral, but the award was the real story. Kaluuya had just won Best Supporting Actor at the 93rd Academy Awards for playing Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party leader killed in a police raid in Chicago in 1969, in Judas and the Black Messiah.
A Camden childhood
Kaluuya was born in London in 1989 to Ugandan parents and grew up in Camden, raised mainly by his mother on a council estate. He started writing and acting young, performing plays and joining youth theatre.
As a teenager he joined the cast of Skins, the Channel 4 drama about teenagers in Bristol, playing Posh Kenneth. He also wrote for the show, contributing to scripts while still in his teens.
Black Mirror and Get Out
His international breakthrough came in two steps. In 2011 he starred in “Fifteen Million Merits”, an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, playing a man who lives in a world where people pedal exercise bikes to earn credits. His final monologue in the episode is one of the most quoted scenes in the series.
Jordan Peele saw the episode and cast him in Get Out (2017) as Chris Washington, a young Black photographer visiting his white girlfriend’s family. The film was a huge hit, and Kaluuya was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. His terrified, tear-streaked face in the “sunken place” scene became one of the most recognisable images of the decade.
Fred Hampton
In Judas and the Black Messiah (2021), directed by Shaka King, Kaluuya played Hampton, the charismatic Chicago chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, who was 21 when he was killed. LaKeith Stanfield played William O’Neal, the FBI informant who infiltrated the party.
Kaluuya’s performance swept the awards season. He won the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the BAFTA and the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
Beyond the Oscar
Kaluuya played W’Kabi in Black Panther (2018), starred in Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), and co-wrote and produced The Kitchen (2023), a Netflix film set in a near-future London, which he also co-directed. He has kept strong ties to London and has spoken about wanting to tell stories from the places he grew up.
The Ugandan connection
Kaluuya’s Ugandan roots are a point of pride in East Africa, and his Oscar was celebrated in Uganda as a win for the country. He has spoken often about the influence of his mother on his work.
He started out writing scenes for a teen drama about Bristol. Fifteen years later he was on the Oscar stage, and his mother was the one who got the biggest laugh.
