The universe has a funny way of bringing things to life. For actress Anna Diop, find her way to the movie Nanny was one of those moments. It started a few years ago when a writer on the show giant emailed her about an exciting new filmmaker named Nikyatu Jusu. He thinks she could be the next Barry Jenkins and encourages Diop to see her work. She watches the short film by Jusu Suicide under the sun and blown away. “I was captivated by the uniqueness of the story—the way it was told through this dark genre, the social issues she was facing in the story, the characters. Overall, I’m really impressed with this filmmaker,” she said from a hotel room in New York City. Diop sent Jusu’s content to her rep in hopes of connecting, but to no avail. Two years passed. Afterward, Nanny appeared in her inbox. Jusu is looking for her lead and she wants Diop to read to it.
Nanny premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the coveted Grand Jury Prize (it’s the first horror film in the festival’s 44-year history to do so and) Jusu is only the second Black woman to win the honor), and Diop’s stellar central performance has received critical acclaim. The film is an insight into the immigrant experience, focusing on a young Senegalese woman named Aisha (Diop) who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy family in hopes of bringing her son to the United States. But when a violent supernatural presence begins to haunt her dreams and creep into her reality, it threatens everything she’s worked for.
“We haven’t seen many films that focus on an individual outside the mainstream of Western society,” says Diop of what initially drew her to the film. “This is a woman who works as a domestic worker and is an immigrant, and I am so excited that we are working on a project that focuses on her, that the eyes are on her, that it depicting the nuances and complexities of her personality.” There are many things for Diop to connect with personally. The actress herself is Senegalese. She immigrated to America as a child with her mother, who worked as a nanny. As she grew up, she was surrounded and nurtured by the women who did these jobs, and she experienced firsthand what it felt like to exist in spaces not built for her.
Aisha is someone Diop has a deep relationship with, and when I asked her what was important for her to show the audience her role in the character, she told me what was written in the play. version was too rich. “[Jusu] really wrote a full person,” she said. “You see Aisha loves. You see Aisha in moments of loneliness and depression. You see her love for her child. You see her trying to navigate the madness that is Amy. You see her loving a child and taking care of a child that is not hers.” With so many layers already on the page, Diop’s mission was to make each of those moments honest and complete, which she did triumphantly.
Interestingly, before Diop joined the project, Aisha was not yet Senegalese. Jusu always planned to tweak the script to suit whatever actress would play the role, so when Diop signed on, she updated the role to fit the ethos of Senegalese culture.
Having spent most of her life in the US, the actress struggled to find her Senegalese accent, so she enlisted the help of a professor and linguist in Senegal to find the right balance. She said: “I can’t just speak with a Senegalese accent because it will be difficult for people to understand. “But fortunately it still makes sense for Aisha’s character because she’s very educated and has been studying English for a long time, so we still found what was true but enough. clear.” Diop worked with a dialect coach three to four hours a day for two weeks prior to filming.
Additional preparations include creating a playlist of music that Aisha may have listened to. Think a lot about soulful and spiritual classical senenian music mixed with some newer Senegalese artists and a bit of Lauryn Hill. There’s also a unique tactic she uses to understand Aisha’s various psychotic states throughout the film.
“I bought four large cardboard boards and hundreds of flashcards,” she told me. “I have the pink and the blue ones. The pink ones are the ones where she’s having a normal moment when she knows she’s fine and everything’s fine, and I’ve written down the events of that scene. ‘Aisha walks on the street. She’s about to board the subway.’ Okay. ‘Aisha meets Malik. They flirt with each other.’ Okay. And then in blue, I wrote all those moments where she wasn’t sure what she was going through was real or what the hell was going on. ‘She found herself in a submerged pool.’ ‘She found herself suffocating for a piece of paper.’ All those moments, I recorded them all on the board, and what I see is, at the top of the board, you see a little bit of blue here and there, a little bit of trouble. And then as the movie progresses, you’ll see more and more of the blue color and the gradation of her madness and madness. That helped me because we shot out of sequence. So before my day starts, I’ll say, ‘Okay, we’re doing scenes 13, 49 and 12. I’m fine. I’m healthy, but I’ve been going through too much blue, so I’m very deranged or confused about what’s going on.”
The slow flare of a young woman on the cusp of insanity is what makes the psychological thriller so enthralling. That and Rina Yang’s beautiful cinematography. Moving through dreamlike states and the real world, blue and gold tinted lights create an eerie feel, and scenes involving water bodies are deliciously haunting.
Jusu’s intention was to combine an American immigrant story with the genre as a way to create more points of access for people to find the film. Awarded at Sundance and debuted at TIFF, the success of Nanny potentially opens the door to many projects like it. “I hope it inspires people—filmmakers and writers with inner stories that they want to tell, that they fear won’t attract attention or won’t sell. I hope it inspires them to want to tell those stories and encourages them to tell those stories,” said Diop. She also hopes the film helps audiences better understand how we benefit from these types of often invisible workers and how their existence in society helps us do the things we do. “I hope it expands people’s empathy and also their view of their place in the world,” she added.
This unique and impactful type of storytelling is what drove Diop to become an actress. She describes herself as an actor of an actor, one whose learning about the craft never ends. There was a Shakespeare summer course in Oxford, then a renowned acting teacher in New York and a bunch of studios in LA. She read every book she got. “I never want another actor to know about another technique I don’t know,” she admits. The result was a successful 16-year career. But at 34, she still has a lot to do. “Across every field, race and culture, filmmakers… are telling new stories and sometimes in new ways, by mixing genres or playing with new genres. That gets me really excited and I hope to be a part of their orbit,” she said. Universe, are you listening?
Catch it Nanny is currently in theaters and streaming on Amazon Prime Video on December 16.
Photographer: Tayo Kuku Jr..
designer: Molly Dickson
Hair designer: LaRae Burress
Create an artist: Shannon Pezzetta
