As a little girl growing up in Houston, Anna Diop devoured rerun after rerun of a particular TV program because her mother was crazy about it. That show, Diop says now, improved her English-language facility — her family relocated from Senegal to the United States when Diop was 5 — and her mother loved its reassuringly merry depiction of the country they now called home.
She particularly loved the star of the show.
“I mean, my mother loves John Ritter,” Diop said, laughing. “‘Three’s Company’ was a huge part of our welcoming into this country. You could tell he had a kind soul. We watched it for months straight. By the time I started school, I was a lot more fluent in English than I would’ve been otherwise.”
To a striking degree, “Nanny” echoes Diop’s own immigrant experience. It’s as if she were fated to join the project written and directed by Nikyatu Jusu, a first-generation American whose mother came from Sierra Leone and was a domestic worker in Atlanta. Likewise, Diop’s mother worked as a babysitter and nanny.
In the low-key, insinuating thriller, Diop plays Aisha, who leaves Senegal to work in New York and set up a new life for herself and her young son who, for the time being, is back home with family. Aisha is haunted by eerie visions and spirits; “Nanny” tests its protagonist’s resolve throughout as she navigates a new city, a discreetly falling-apart employer, and Aisha’s increasingly urgent longing for her son and her homeland.
In an interview during the Chicago International Film Festival in October, where she received the festival’s Rising Star Award for her portrayal in “Nanny,” Diop recalled how her father came to America years before the rest of the family to work and save up to bring them over. He moved from Senegal to Virginia for engineering school as part of a program with the military, she said. After that, he had two options: France or America. He ended up working for the city of Houston.
Diop, now 34, experienced a radical and sadly common shift in her being when she came to America. “In Senegal, I was just a bubbly, happy child, very well loved; my mother made sure of that,” Diop said. It took a long time to prepare the immigration paperwork for Diop and her mother. (Diop’s younger brother was born a few years later.) When they got there, Houston was, for Diop, “incredibly lonely. My dad worked all the time. I had no friends, and we had no family, really. Didn’t speak the language. I was different all of a sudden. I sounded different. I looked different.”
In time, she said, “I found community in other immigrant families. Houston had a huge Indian population, so most of my friends growing up were Indian girls, either first-gen or similar to me, recently moved to the States. Nigerian, Vietnamese — the first-gen kids. Those were my people. But I always felt outcast.” The formidable title role in “Nanny” offered Diop a way of channeling what she went through.
If her mother had let her, Diop would’ve accepted a modeling offer to move to Milan at 16, the result of an audition in New York for aspiring actors and models. “But she wasn’t having it,” Diop said.
After high school Diop went the other way, geographically, moving to L.A. The modeling career fell together there and, gradually, more to her liking, a career as an actor. First small roles on TV; then larger ones. She worked her way up in her 20s, eventually adding feature film work (recently, a role in Jordan Peele’s “Us”). Today, at least before “Nanny,” Diop is best known as Kory Anders, also known as intergalactic warrior princess Starfire, in the HBO Max series “Titans.”
When cast in that DC superhero show, Diop endured plenty of racist fanboy hate online regarding the use of a Black actor in a role originally conceived as orange. The othering is constant in this culture. Diop learned that by the time she was in kindergarten.
Working with “Nanny” director Jusu, she said, represented a fearsome challenge — Aisha is rarely off-screen, ever — and her greatest strides as a performer. The movie came together quickly, shooting last year under strict COVID restrictions, and then premiering a few months later at Sundance.
Before shooting a scene, especially the film’s later scenes when Aisha is being pulled by unseen forces, director Jusu was “always encouraging me to be less apologetic in my approach. I think it’s a flaw I have personally in my life. Who you are personally comes out in your work; your strengths, your weaknesses, are right there on the screen. Especially as the story progresses, and Aisha is imbued with these spirits, Nikyatu pushed me in all the right ways. We had such similar backgrounds as people; we knew how to speak to each other.”
Aisha’s employers, the tense, brittle couple played by Michelle Monaghan and Morgan Spector, are important to the story. Nonetheless, centering Aisha in the story, Diop says, was “something Nikyatu was constantly fighting for. She was getting notes to focus more on (Monaghan and Spector). But she really fought to keep the gaze on Aisha.” The film is better for it. And its crucial performance points like an arrow to where Diop might go from here.
———
'NANNY'
MPAA rating: R (for some language and brief sexuality/nudity)
Running time: 1:38
How to watch: Now in theaters; on Prime Video Dec. 16
———
