‘IT’S A BRUTAL GAME. YOU HAVE TO FIND A WAY TO STAY IN TUNE WITH REALITY’
Why settle for one profession when you can excel at three? That’s what Nathaniel Martello-White has done. He began his career as an actor, but has since become a successful playwright and an award-winning director before the age of 34.
Martello-White graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, a school whose doors have welcomed Anthony Hopkins, Alan Rickman, Ralph Fiennes, Roger Moore and Tom Hiddleston as students over the years. But having RADA on his résumé hasn’t guaranteed success, and Martello-White has had enough setbacks to know you can appreciate a good job when it comes around. This perhaps explains why he’s turned his hand to other disciplines, although when you have as much to offer as the south London native, such multitasking was perhaps inevitable. For instance, Martello-White’s first play, Blackta, satirised the problematic audition processes faced by black actors; his second, Torn, looked at the difficulties faced by a mixed-raced south London family; and the short film he wrote and directed that won best U.K. short at Raindance in 2017, Cla’am, hit back at gentrification in his hometown of Brixton. But for the immediate future at least, 2018 is shaping up to be the year of acting for Martello-White. First comes Kiri, a four-part Channel 4 drama by Jack Thorne that examines the mysterious death of a young black girl who was set to be
