Queen & Slim: Daniel Kaluuya talks first dates, sex scenes and being a huge Neighbours fan
The star of Get Out and Black Panther wants to bring his mother to Melbourne so they can explore the stomping ground of his favourite Neighbours.
Daniel Kaluuya has never been to Australia, but he is intimately acquainted with one specific area of Melbourne.
Granted, Erinsborough’s Ramsay Street doesn’t exist outside of the Australian soap opera Neighbours. But Kaluuya, the Oscar-nominated star of Get Out, Black Panther and this month’s romantic thriller Queen & Slim, written by Lena Waithe and directed by Melina Matsoukas, knows it well.
His mother, a huge fan from the Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan days, got him hooked on the world of the Robinsons and the Kennedys early. So much so that he still feels starstruck around Margot Robbie, with whom he has twice appeared on The Graham Norton Show.
“I saw Margot yesterday,” Kaluuya says. “Come on, man! She’s on Neighbours!”
Was Kaluuya watching when Robbie was starring as fashionista Donna Freedman? “I think I zoned out a little bit when Margot was on, I think I was living life... But that’s my s**t,” he enthuses. “I’m obsessed.”
One day, he wants to take his mum to Australia so that they can visit all the iconic locations from the television series. “Apparently there’s a pub where all the Neighbours cast go,” Kaluuya says, grinning. “I need to go with my mum.”
But don’t go looking for Kaluuya in Melbourne anytime soon. The actor is currently operating a very busy, globetrotting schedule.
To promote Queen & Slim, the Bonnie & Clyde-esque drama in which he stars as Slim opposite Jodie Turner-Smith’s Queen, a couple forced to go on the run after a shocking act of police brutality, he’s already travelled to Los Angeles, Mexico and Paris.
Today, we’re talking in his hometown of London, where Kaluuya was born and raised in Kentish Town, and where he hopes he will be able to spend a bit more time. “A holiday for me is staying somewhere for three months,” he jokes.
This has been Kaluuya’s life ever since he broke big in Jordan Peele’s smash-hit horror film Get Out. As Chris, a photographer who visits the family of his white girlfriend Rose (Alison Williams) for a weekend getaway gone horribly, violently wrong, Kaluuya garnered critical acclaim and an Oscar nomination.
Since then, he has turned in impeccable performances in Black Panther, Widows and the conversation-starting Queen & Slim, which challenges audiences to confront systemic racism head-on.
Next, Kaluuya will star as the Black Panther Party’s Fred Hampton in a biopic that also features his Get Out co-stars LaKeith Stanfield and Lil Rey Howery. And after that? Who knows. “I would love to make a comedy,” he shares. “It’s just really hard to make those. To have a great script – it’s like gold dust.”
Kaluuya was drawn to Queen & Slim because of the script by Master Of None scribe Waithe, which strove to depict an intimate romance between two nuanced, complex black characters.
“It was honest about its blackness,” Kaluuya explains. “It didn’t shy away from its blackness. It is what it is, it’s not defined by its blackness – well it is defined by its blackness to a certain extent – but it’s everything, it’s not a monolith.”
Queen & Slim is also a film about modern love, too. The movie opens on the titular couple in the middle of their first date, having matched on Tinder earlier that afternoon. (“What’s that done to love?” Kaluuya muses. “What’s that done to connection? We’re just obsessed with that device.”)
Afterwards, as Slim drives Queen home, they are confronted by a police officer in the middle of the cold Cleveland night, who demands that Slim step out of the car and place his hands on his vehicle.
Production took place while the city battled a frigid polar vortex. “We had to have a 15 minute break every hour, it was that cold,” Kaluuya recalls. Hot soup was handed out during every pause.
“I had to touch that car with my bare hands,” he says. “It looked like it was nothing but I’m telling you this f**king now, that was one of the craziest, most difficult – and trying to act? My hand could get stuck, yeah?”
In the film, Slim implores the police officer to have some compassion, telling him that he’s feeling the cold. “That wasn’t in the script,” Kaluuya reveals. “That was just, it was cold. It was like please, I’m a human being. Do you understand? Can you see me? You’re a human being too, I see you. It’s cold. Can we go home?”
Kaluuya admits that he’s had some pretty abysmal first dates in his time, as far as first dates go. “Look at my face, you know I have,” he says, laughing. “This girl slapped me once. She just kissed me then slapped me, kissed me then slapped me. That was intense. Been in some sh***y places for dates. Like a weird pub that turned a bit south.
“I’ve had a fight on a date,” Kaluuya adds. “Not like a physical fight but like…”
An argument? “Yeah. And the girl was like ‘We’re gonna laugh about this one day.’ And I’m like, ‘Are we? I dunno about that!’”
Kaluuya’s performance in Queen & Slim is mesmerising: at first puffed up on charm and bravado before melting into a study in vulnerability and empathy. The relationship between his character Slim and Turner-Smith’s imperious Queen – Kaluuya described her audition, fondly, as “politely disrespectful” – is the heart and soul of the film, anchoring the movie’s brutal and shocking moments of brutality in reality.
Director Matsoukas, known as the woman behind video clips for Beyoncé and Rihanna and whom Kaluuya describes as a “genuine artist”, quite literally makes this point when, at one point in the film, she intercuts a very romantic sex scene between Queen and Slim with images of a protest turned violent.
“The sex is the dialogue,” Kaluuya explains. “What story are we telling in this scene… The minute you do that you get out of your own head about ‘performing it’. I think that’s the same with life. In the bedroom, the minute you stop trying to ‘perform’, you probably have a better time.”
Sex scenes are necessarily awkward, but Kaluuya says he was “blessed” with a thoughtful director, writer and scene partner.
“[You need to be] having a unified conversation about what are we doing here,” he explains. “So when we are feeling like, essentially, after [Matsoukas] shouts cut, a guy with his arse out, on top of a girl with her arse out, pretending to have sex and there are people watching you. You know? That’s kind of weird.”
Kaluuya occupies an interesting position at the nexus of both independent cinema, courtesy of Queen & Slim, and glossy Marvel blockbusters like Black Panther.
Auteurs of the former, such as Martin Scorsese, have complained about the impact of the latter on modern cinema, eroding the mid-budget productions, prioritising action over small, intimate storytelling. But Kaluuya says it’s not as simple as it seems.
“People love them,” Kaluuya muses, of Marvel movies. “Sometimes people just want to go to the cinema and have a good time. Life’s hard. Sometimes you turn on the news and there’s nothin’ on the news but the blues, you know what I’m saying?
“Sometimes you want to see a superhero smash it up and win. People want positive narratives because the soap opera that is the news gives you just negative ones. I’m kind of like, everyone should get what they want. I would have a problem if arthouse films stopped because of it. But if everyone can exist, then everyone can exist.”
Figuring out that balance is Kaluuya’s next challenge. After his Oscar nomination in 2018, which the actor calls a “very transformative experience”, Kaluuya has made a concerted effort to be choosy about what projects he takes on. Which means that following the Fred Hampton biopic Kaluuya has a yawning gap in his schedule.
“I’m excited about it,” he says. “I kind of need to reassess. I need to catch up to myself and go: Where am I at? What am I passionate about? What do I want to see? What do my friends want to see? And it may take a little while, it may take a long time.” But like Arnie in The Terminator, he’ll be back.
“I love making stuff,” Kaluuya says. “It makes me happy.”
Queen & Slim is in cinemas on 12 March
Hannah-Rose Yee is a freelance writer
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