13 years after Belle, Gugu Mbatha-Raw is ‘fighting for justice’ once more

It’s over a decade since Gugu Mbatha-Raw starred as Britain’s first black aristocrat in Belle, but the film remains a ‘very special project’, as her first lead role.

Mbatha-Raw’s new Sky supernatural thriller Possession, which is so out-of-the-box that description doesn’t properly sum it up, similarly follows a mixed-race woman entangled in an inheritance case, with the legacy of slavery all around her.

The 43-year-old tells Metro there are ‘common themes’ between Dido Elizabeth Belle and her character Claudia, a lawyer sent to Jamaica after the descendant of a wealthy plantation owner bequeaths his fortune to a local man nobody knows or can track down.

She’s accompanied there by the late aristocrat’s son, played by Johnny Lee Miller, who thought the lump sum was coming his way. Yet when she arrives at the maybe-haunted former plantation, Claudia’s allegiances begin to shift.

‘I think what Possession takes a step further than Belle did is that it takes the story into the present,’ says Mbatha-Raw.

‘It’s not only looking at a romantic piece of history, but it’s saying, this is how the history has informed our present day and who is accountable for righting the wrongs of the past?’

She adds: ‘They’re definitely part of the same lineage in a way, but I think that where Belle was a lady and in a love story, I see Claudia as a warrior in the fight for justice. So very different women, with related themes.’

The supernatural element comes into play with the entrance of Bel Powley, who looks like she’s strolled in from the set of Belle.

One of our mantras throughout this process was past is present

In fact, she is the lady of Hope Hill plantation in the 18th century. The drama dips and weaves between the present and the colonial past, where the modern-day inheritor of the estate is an enslaved man.

The parallel timelines – which are not flashbacks, director Storm Saulter stresses – underline how misplaced we are in thinking that colonialism is at an historical remove. In Possession, it reverberates down the years.

This is demonstrated overtly, with conversations about reparatory justice, but also in the filmmaking techniques employed by Saulter’s direction.

‘One of our mantras throughout this process was past is present,’ he tells Metro, noting that the scenes at Hope Hill, past and present, were shot at a real former plantation house in Jamaica.

‘People lived and died in that space for hundreds of years, so I had that consciousness in my mind, and also the story itself,’ he says.

‘Visually, I tried to find ways to transition between past and present like you’re slipping in, not like ta da da! We’re going to the past!

‘No, the past and the present are woven together and in a quite literal sense, we had scenes where there was visual mirroring.’ 

Saulter breaks down an example in which one character is drinking rum in the past scenes, and this is matched up to another drinking holy water in the present. ‘You could layer the shots on top of each other, and you’d see the exact frames and the exact movement.’

It’s ‘subtle’, he says, but there are instances across the show where that visual language of repetition is used, as well as sound effects like tree frogs and drumming, which would have been present in the 1700s and so are used in the contemporary scenes too. 

‘It’s these subconscious things that tell you this world has been walked in,’ he says. ‘So everywhere we could find ways to tie the two, we did.’

It also sets up what is to come when – slightest of spoilers – the two timelines start to bleed together narratively, with a case of literal possession across the eras. In Sky’s time-bending thriller, and perhaps in life too, the present is the past, and the past is the present.

Possession airs on Sky Atlantic on August 6 at 9pm.