Noma Dumezweni is enjoying growing older – hardly surprising when you consider how much success the 52-year-old actor has enjoyed in recent years. After two decades of alternating between well-received theatre roles and ephemeral guest spots on Casualty and Holby City (“I’d play a nurse here, a receptionist there”), she hit the big time in 2016 when cast as the adult Hermione Grainger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the stage play set 19 years after the events of the final novel in the series.
In terms of her career, the Potter effect could be witnessed overnight: “I’ve always done two or three plays a year,” says Dumezweni. “And then you go: ‘I’ve got this TV work, I’ve got that TV work – this is a nice new world.’” And it’s true that things are ticking along nicely. A guest spot in BBC Three’s lockdown hit Normal People was followed by a main role in The Undoing, the Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman-starring psychological thriller that pipped Succession to the title of HBO’s most watched show of 2020.
