Possessed by her purpose - After years of opening doors for other J’can actors, Nadean Rawlins steps through one, landing biggest role of her career

WESTERN BUREAU:

For years, Nadean Rawlins has been opening doors for other people.

As producer, director, talent manager, and head of RAW Management, she has pushed Jamaican actors towards auditions, encouraged young creatives, fought for opportunities, and worked behind the scenes to help build an industry she believes Jamaica deserves.

So, when Possession – the new Sky original supernatural thriller – came calling, Rawlins was doing what she normally does, trying to get Jamaican actors into the room.

She wasn’t looking for Mercy Stevens. Mercy, it seems, was looking for her.

“I was focused on pushing the actors,” Rawlins recalled in a sit-down with The Sunday Gleaner last week. “Me want the actor dem get dem chance.”

Then, director Storm Saulter encouraged her to look at some of the roles herself.

Among them was Mercy – a street-smart, flamboyant Jamaican woman with a fire-red wig, plenty of jewellery, long nails, a deep attachment to family, and another identity that makes her one of the most intriguing characters in the five-part series.

Mercy is an obeahwoman. For Rawlins, who has spent some 30 years acting, producing, and directing, the role has become the biggest acting opportunity of her career.

“This role is groundbreaking for me,” she said. “I have never done anything of this magnitude in my years of doing it.”

It is a remarkable turn for a woman who has increasingly moved behind the camera, even though acting had never really left her.

Her aunt, she recalled, once gave her a warning.

“Why you not acting?” she asked her. “You know say if you have talent from God and you don’t use it, He will take it away?”

Rawlins listened.

“I unapologetically stepped into it,” she said.

Possession, created and written by Karla Crome and directed by Jamaican filmmaker Saulter, follows Claudia, played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a biracial lawyer who travels to Jamaica to deal with an inheritance dispute involving a former plantation. The story moves between Britain and Jamaica, weaving the supernatural into questions of colonialism, history, race, and identity.

Among the Jamaican talent appearing in the production are Sheldon Shepherd and Chantal Jackson, alongside Rawlins.

Saulter, speaking recently about assembling the Jamaican cast, described Rawlins as a “powerhouse” in the role of Mercy.

It is an appropriate description for both the woman and the character.

Mercy, Rawlins insists, cannot simply be reduced to the frightening, mysterious obeahwoman long embedded in Jamaican folklore.

“She is a big woman from Jamaica, very spirited, street-smart, layered, deep down family-oriented,” she said.

“Mercy is a survivor.”

And a hustler.

She practises what she calls spiritual healing or the role of a priestess, but Rawlins delights in the contradictions built into the character.

There is the headwrap when Mercy assumes her spiritual persona. Take it off, however, and out comes that blazing red wig. Add jewellery, nails, and attitude, and suddenly the stereotypical image begins to disappear.

Spiritual realm

“She’s a typical, regular Jamaican woman,” Rawlins said, laughing as she described a woman who can inhabit the spiritual realm and then go to the shop to buy bread.

“I really loved how nuanced she was.”

Preparing for Mercy also forced Rawlins to examine something much deeper.

Growing up Jamaican, she had absorbed many of the same messages about obeah as everybody else. You hear “obeah” and you think bad, evil, whatever. Mercy made her read, and the more she researched African-derived spiritual traditions, the more Rawlins began questioning some of the assumptions she had inherited.

Growing up Jamaican, she had absorbed many of the same messages about obeah as everybody else. You hear “obeah” and you think bad, evil, whatever. Mercy made her read, and the more she researched African-derived spiritual traditions, the more Rawlins began questioning some of the assumptions she had inherited.

She came to understand obeah in the context of ancestry, spirituality, healing, slavery, and resistance, and believes Jamaicans should learn its history before deciding for themselves what they believe.

That did not mean she was afraid to play Mercy – not for a second.

“When you’re playing a role, you’re playing a role,” she said. “It’s suspension of belief, of disbelief. It’s not Nadean Rawlins up there; it’s Mercy Stevens.”

“... wear the skin of

this character”

And when Rawlins becomes a character, she goes all the way.

“I literally wear the skin of this character,” she told The Sunday Gleaner.

Mercy, however, managed to follow her home once. For one scene, Rawlins was fitted with black contact lenses that covered her eyes. She loved the effect and revelled in the transformation on set.

That night, she dreamt she couldn’t get the black lenses out. She laughs about it now.

Away from Mercy’s darkness, Rawlins is quick to describe herself with a much simpler word. “Fun.”

She loves people. She loves her friends and family. She calls herself a thinker and a doer and speaks almost relentlessly about positivity. But the woman, accustomed to portraying formidable women, admits there is a price attached to being perceived as one.

“People sometimes assume that, because Nadean Rawlins is strong, she cannot fall apart. If I complain or cry about something, people say, ‘But Nadean, you’re strong. You can do it, Nadean. You have done this before. You have been through so many things’.”

Sometimes she admits that it annoys her.

“I’m only human.”

She hurts. She cries. She becomes despondent, and sometimes the woman so many others lean on needs her own circle of good friends to help carry her.

Perhaps nowhere is the softness beneath that strength more apparent than when Rawlins talks about motherhood. She has no biological children. She wanted them. Yet, over the years, another form of motherhood found her.

There are mentees and younger people who look to her as a maternal figure, and she admits that the roles in which she plays a mother have often touched something particularly deep.

She remembers one production in which she played the mother of a young woman in labour. Night after night, she listened to the character playing her daughter scream and, night after night, Rawlins cried.

She understood the mother’s anguish, never having given birth herself. It is that ability to reach for something beyond her own experience that has sustained a love affair with acting stretching back decades. As a young woman working in corporate Jamaica, Rawlins could hardly wait for the workday to end so she could get to the Little Theatre.

She remembers asking veteran pantomime performer Doreen King what came next. Rawlins didn’t simply want to enjoy acting. She wanted to find a way to make a life from it. She eventually did – not always in front of the camera, but in an ecosystem built around storytelling, acting, directing, producing, talent management, and advocacy.

Today, she is founder and managing director of RAW Management Limited, president of the Jamaica Film and Television Association, and a director of Women in Film and Television International.

Filmmaking journey

Her filmmaking journey has also taken her through international development programmes associated with Rotterdam, Locarno, Cannes, and EAVE. Still, when asked whether there was ever a moment when she considered walking away from entertainment, her response came immediately.

“Never. I can’t,” she told The Sunday Gleaner.

“When I was in corporate, all I would think about is doing it (working in entertainment industry). I used to leave work, like you work nine to five, and I could not wait to get to the theatre.”

That hunger remains.

Rawlins is now working on two feature-length films, producing one and directing the other, as well as a television project and a documentary.

And after spending so much time helping other Jamaican actors find their opportunities, she’s waiting for another script with her own name written somewhere inside it.

“I’m also an actor,” she declared. “So, if there’s a role, I am definitely gonna play it.”

Mercy may have been the role Rawlins never saw coming, but perhaps her aunt was right all along. Some gifts simply refuse to be left unused.

janet.silvera@gleanerjm.com