“One of the things I’ll always love about making videos is that 60 seconds is all it takes to change your life,” Munya Chawawa says. “As much as I want to go out and write film scripts, there’s something cool about knowing your magnum opus could be less than a minute away.”

For anyone in the UK who has spent much of the 2020s glued to their smartphone – most of us, then – the 33-year-old comedian, actor and presenter and his magnificent eyebrows will be a familiar sight. Seismic times, it turns out, call for lightning-fast reaction videos. As well as well-observed character skits, from the landed-gentry drill artist Unknown P to a boiling-over version of Nigella Lawson. Only, building that level of engagement often came at a cost to his own social life. Having to spring into action and produce a hot take every time a politician did something they shouldn’t meant a lot of his own plans would get dropped at the last minute.

“Many a time, good friends were left waiting in a Wagamama, which is a fast track to ruining friendships,” Chawawa says.

Not so with Joe McArdle, Chawawa’s best buddy of some 10 years, who appears with him in this video – both wearing the new collection from Mr P. As part of the team behind his videos, he would see more of Chawawa than most. The flipside is that this has often meant frantic runs between their London homes at short notice to make the films.

“That boy risked life and limb on various electric bikes just to try and get there in time,” Chawawa says. “He really was living a side hustle of Vin Diesel, Fast And Furious, trying to help with these satirical projects.”

Chawawa describes McArdle, also an actor, as being “driven, but in a much more relaxed way. I’m like a wild, electric ferret whereas Joe’s very mellow. Like a boat just bobbing along the ocean. He’s one of the only friends where I’m totally unconscious of what I’m doing and how I look and how much silence there is between us when we’re together. And I think that’s the [sign of a] true friendship.”

The changing landscape of social media has made Chawawa rethink his process, though. Which means fewer circumnavigations of south London for McArdle.

“There was a time where being fastest was most beneficial to my career,” Chawawa says. “Being a… human personification of Sonic the Hedgehog – that’s something I proudly waved about on my LinkedIn. But now, speed is easy to achieve. Also, as a USP, it’s not sustainable. Nor necessarily a good thing.

“Speed is no longer my priority,” he says (at rapid pace). “What I’m creating now, I’m more proud of.”

What his 1.8 million TikTok and 1.4 million Instagram followers might be missing in terms of quantity – by his standards – he is replacing with quality. “I would love people to look at the videos that I make now and think, I don’t even know where I would start doing that,” he says. “How would I begin to replicate that?”

His skill for precipitous but polished parodies betrays Chawawa’s earlier background, behind the scenes in television. But what he really wanted was the chance to be in front of the camera. “Comedy is something that I stumbled upon accidentally as a means to another end, which was presenting,” he says.

He managed both with his Bafta-nominated 2022 documentary How To Survive A Dictator, which draws on his childhood experiences in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and deftly balances the serious with the funny. He says it also offered “closure” to other exiles from the country.

The same year, he appeared as a contestant on Taskmaster. “I was dressed as this Swiss Army knife action man,” he says of the outfit he wore for the show. “And that’s what I became. Everyone was like, ‘Munya’s just a madman. He does the most difficult version of every task.’ I was definitely infused with the power of the overalls.”

Chawawa says he didn’t fully grasp the show’s cult following until after he appeared on it. “Nor did I know the format well enough,” he admits. “If I ever meet Hollywood stars, a lot of them will know me from that.”

In his post-lockdown flurry, he hosted the MOBO Awards and appeared in Rye Lane and the Netflix series The Sandman. But for all the honours and cameos, Chawawa traces his more recent shift towards “bigger legacy projects” to his 2024 appearance on the celebrity version of The Great British Bake Off (Baking Show in the US). Not so much the baking itself – although Chawawa boasts that “streets be calling me ‘Pretzel Papi’ now” after his success in a technical challenge – more that, despite amassing more than 50 million likes on TikTok alone, he was miscategorised on the show as “a podcaster”.

“I remember I kind of laughed,” he says. “But also, my heart sunk a little bit. I don’t even have a podcast…”

It wasn’t just all his hard work dismissed by someone not doing their research. It was a repeated pattern, experienced, he says, by athletes, comedians and actors. “Especially Black actors who’ve had to move over to America. Britain loves to boil a person down to their smallest atom, or to the most unimpressive thing they’re deemed to do.”

So began his new mission: he needed to make himself “undeniable as an entertainer,” he says.

His pivot towards television in particular, he says, is because TV shows still feel like “golden tickets”, even in this age. “Online, I could make the greatest video I’ve ever made today. And all it takes for you to move [on from] that piece of work is one flick. Whereas TV, you’ve got a lock-in for an hour. You’re one of the 50 [shows] a day, as opposed to this infinite well of stuff.” He says he wants to “make something permanent”.

To that end, he has made moves to create not just a legacy but to help instigate change. Last year he launched the Black Boys Theatre Club, a community-led project to give Black 15- and 16-year-old young men better access to West End productions. “Theatre is expensive for everyone,” he says. “I’m aware of that. But it’s almost as if young Black boys are furthest away.”

Chawawa is acting himself. First up, in the forthcoming Channel 4 comedy series Schooled. “I play a maths teacher with the spirit animal of a PE teacher,” Chawawa says, claiming his performance is based on a teacher he had back in Zimbabwe, also called Munya.

And he’s making his own debut on stage, playing Bottom in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Chichester Festival Theatre this autumn. He says this will require “a whole different level of prep. I can’t just mimic my old PE teachers, I need to learn everything about Shakespeare.”

His plan is to “do so much that it becomes impossible for someone to cast me off as what they think I might be. And I will get my vengeance,” he jokes. “Like they say at the end of The Avengers movies, ‘Pretzel Papi will return’.”