The day before I meet Mr Paapa Essiedu, I watch him on stage in the West End, sprinting manically with an electronic tag around his ankle, reenacting a teenage romance around a disco ball and charismatically interplaying with the audience. This is his masterful one-man performance in Messrs Clint Dyer and Roy Williams’ state-of-the-nation trilogy, Death Of England. And Delroy – a Black, Brexit-voting bailiff who aspires to be upwardly mobile, but is contained and beaten down by police and societal racism – is the kind of unflinching, confronting role for which Essiedu is becoming distinguished.

Most noted for his stage and television work – whether it’s his Emmy- and Bafta-nominated breakout in Ms Michaela Coel’s acclaimed consent drama I May Destroy You, or his award-winning Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company – Essiedu is attune to the thought-provoking influences that art can have on an audience.

Speaking after his MR PORTER shoot, the actor is soft spoken and pensive. “I started off in theatre,” he begins, “so you’re in the same room as people receiving your work. When I started doing plays, or TV shows, with a political edge, it kind of elevates the meaning of your job or graft in a way. It makes it feel like it’s something that can provoke conversations, questions and debate.”

For Essiedu, no role is technically off limits, though he tells me with mild but audible frustration of a period when he was “getting offered a lot of slave roles, a lot of period dramas as a butler or servant, which I think speaks to how I was perceived in the industry, rather than my interest or my historical knowledge”.

He wouldn’t entirely write off such a role, but the intention and craft behind it is what matters. “What is the point being made?” he says. “How are we expanding the life and humanity of these characters? How are we moving away from stereotypes or archetypes and finding real people?”

This inclination towards roles that sketch out real humanity has, in part, driven his appearance in The Outrun, the film adapted from Ms Amy Liptrot’s memoir, in which the author writes about her return home to the Orkney Islands after entering rehab following a battle with alcohol addiction in London. Ms Saoirse Ronan stars as the autobiographical Rona, with Essiedu playing her sometimes-lover Daynin, their relationship constructed through a series of fraught and devastating flashbacks.

What attracted Essiedu to this role was his love for the book, “the rawness, the revelation of very difficult truth that was at the centre of it,” he says. “Amy talking about her experience and love for the hedonism and newness of her life in London and everything that came with that, and then the struggle towards recovery, and how recovery comes in many different shapes and forms and has many different stages. I just thought it was incredibly brave and courageous.”

It also gave him the opportunity to work alongside Ronan, who Essiedu calls “the Goat” of his generation of actors, distinct for her singular portraits of trauma, sickness and dislocation.

They were able to prepare together as they live near each other in north London. “We spent a lot of time just talking about relationships, experiences of addiction, both personally and with people that we know and love,” Essiedu says.

The Outrun required an inventive approach to developing his character. “In the film, you’re looking at a relationship that happens over a number of years and you get snapshots of it,” he says. “We wanted to create something that felt like it had a layer and dimension that could be summoned in 30- and 60-second scenes. So, we just spent a lot of time getting to know each other, getting to trust each other, getting to figure out how each other works. There wasn’t really a script, there was the book, and obviously there’s a story outline, but there’s no dialogue. So, we spent time figuring out how we imaginatively danced together, and that [created] the relationship.”

Essiedu doesn’t live far now from where he grew up in Walthamstow, in a single-parent home with his late mother, Selina. She taught fashion and design for adult education colleges and also worked commercially in their home.

“In our kitchen we had two big sewing machines and an overlocker, and a massive table for pattern cutting,” Essiedu says. “She would make hundreds and hundreds of pockets a day.”

His mother’s craft is something that he’s grown to appreciate since the days when he would help her with stitching clothes. He has a pair of 20-year-old pyjamas that she made for him, which he still wears every night. They are a silk-like material, light and red-and-white striped. “There is no substitute for something like that. Obviously, that’s compounded by the fact that she can never do that again. So, there is a beautiful rareness to it.”

A strong sense of fashion is clearly something he has inherited. His red-carpet moments have been spectacular. His velvet suit with billowy trousers, paired with an emerald necklace was a standout at the 2022 Met Gala, as was his archive Joe Casely-Hayford fit at the 2023 London Fashion Awards.

Essiedu’s off-duty style is distinctive, too. When he travelled to New York to perform The Effect on Broadway alongside Ms Taylor Russell, he realised that his personal style fit with the inhabitants of Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn, and right now he’s enjoying a lot of LOEWE. He was at the fashion house’s SS25 men’s show in Paris earlier this year. “I found that line to be pleasingly theatrical. Today, my favourite look was a LOEWE look,” he says of his MR PORTER shoot. “I’m enjoying [Jonathan Anderson’s] work.”

As a teenager, attending a school in Walthamstow where he had won a scholarship, Essiedu excelled in sciences and had a place to study medicine at UCL, the kind of life-raft career pathway that is sold as transforming the prospects of working-class Black boys. For Essiedu, this academic success was “more than I could’ve ever imagined possible for me”. But he had tasted his first proper acting experience, starring as Othello in a sixth-form play, and couldn’t shake the feeling that he might want to explore his abilities there.

After struggling somewhat at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, new to acting and catching up with people who had made their starts in youth theatre or already had professional gigs under their belt, Essiedu joined the Royal Shakespeare Company upon graduating. At 25, he was cast as Hamlet, and it was at this point that he became more cognisant of the career elements of being an actor that were separate to the artistry. That is, having to repeatedly answer endless, redundant questions about what it was like to be the first Black actor cast as Hamlet. But Essiedu was quietly suffering while in this role, as he was still reckoning with the death of his mother, who had passed during his first year at Guildhall.

“There’s obviously a million different readings of that play, but mine was very focused on this idea of a young man processing grief, and I was a young man processing grief at the time,” he says. “I was just going through it for real onstage night after night and it had a very detrimental effect on my mental and physical health.”

At drama school, he had been taught that inhabiting the emotions of a character, sacrificing yourself to it, was the cornerstone of good acting. But he’s come to reject this now. Essiedu considers that a character is such a culmination of ideas from so many people – the writer, the director, the costume designer – that it would almost be self-indulgent as the actor to think that he solely inhabits them.

“As soon as I made that adjustment in my approach, it made it straightforward to allow the character to be,” he says. “That’s why I don’t get into my costume until two minutes before a play starts or we’re just about to go to set because I’m not interested in existing [in it] any longer than I need to be.”

It’s a healthy approach to his craft and an admirable exercise of boundaries, though he admits that he needs to get better at giving himself downtime from work.

“The fear of things being taken away from you at any moment really kicks in and you think you need to do something again before it’s too late,” he says. “But you need to respect your body, respect your talent, you can take time off and then the other thing will come.”

Right now, he’s trying to go away more. And he’s recently started playing football again and got into the gym. “I never thought I’d be able to do that because I always found those spaces intimidating and aggressive,” he says. He’s a visually strapping man, but it’s his kind eyes and soft voice which strike you. Even in discussing the mechanics of weightlifting, he is thoughtful about its psychosomatic impact. “I’m learning more about [fitness] in a way I’m finding useful for my mental health and self-esteem,” he says.

Essiedu has an obvious groundedness and natural humility. Celebrity and its flashing lights aren’t a driving factor for him, but an appreciation for the myriad opportunities he is experiencing in his craft is.

“I feel grateful,” he says. “There’s loads of things I’m proud of and it’s nice when people recognise that. I also know how I started, I’ve done plays above pubs where the dressing room is the toilet. And I’ve done them gratefully; that’s been foundational for the building of my career.”