Maisie Richardson-Sellers has often taken a leap of faith, and it’s nearly always paid off. Before the 30-year-old made her first ever on-screen appearance, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, no less, and before starring in megawatt franchises like Netflix’s The Kissing Booth and Legends of Tomorrow, she worked odd jobs, including for a London helicopter tour company. She would hand out flyers and take official photos when couples got engaged on the trips. Sometimes, when people failed to show up, she would ask if she could replace them in the helicopter. No use wasting an empty seat. “I’d try my luck and ask for a ride,” the actor says. It was always worth it. Every now and then Richardson-Sellers would be whisked high into the sky, to bear witness to the city she grew up in from dazzling new heights.
Richardson-Sellers (who uses both she and they pronouns) is calling from Miami, during a brief period of downtime while filming a “queer psychological thriller” about gaslighting and emotional abuse. She’s currently on screen in the cyberwarfare drama The Undeclared War, written by Peter Kosminsky, who directed Wolf Hall. She plays tech analyst Kathy, both tightly wound and smart enough to downplay her own shyness. In conversation, though, she has the quiet confidence of someone who knows they can ace the test, even if they don’t know the questions yet, and her black turtle-neck top and long braided hair gives her the fortified coolness of a gallery curator.
“Peter seems to have this uncanny knack of being one step ahead of the political climate,” she says, of Kosminsky. Several of the show’s plot points – the long shadow of Putin, Boris Johnson being ousted by his own government – were works of fiction when Kosminsky began researching the series five years ago. Now the whole thing feels eerily cosmic in its accuracy. “To have that kind of foresight is pretty unnerving.”
Richardson-Sellers has a knack for attracting good fortune. It’s not luck, rather a flair for playing a great hand with whatever she’s been dealt. How else do you explain an Oxford anthropology and archeology graduate taking a punt and trying for the lead role in a Star Wars movie? An agent had already approached her after doing a couple of plays at university. “‘Have you ever thought about acting?’ Funny you should say that, I have actually,” she says. She originally auditioned for the part of Rey (which went to Daisy Ridley), and spent eight months attending auditions, meetings and screen tests. Caught out by a last-minute callback deadline, she once used a child’s toy train as a makeshift gun. She didn’t get the part. But director JJ Abrams saw something in her and offered her a small role anyway. “It was my first time on a professional set,” she says. “I didn’t know what ‘standing on your mark’ was!” As a military officer, her first scene was a one-on-one with Carrie Fisher. “I was terrified,” she says. “But she was so warm and gentle and lit the whole room up with her smile. I told her, afterwards: ‘That was my first ever scene.’ And she invited me back to her trailer to hang out with her daughter. She didn’t have to do that. I mean… What?”
Though Richardson-Sellers didn’t go to drama school, acting runs in her blood. Both her parents are actors, mainly in theatre. Her mother, Joy Richardson, played John Boyega’s mum in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe; her father is Trevor Sellers. “My parents worked on incredible plays that were politically conscious, or heartbreaking and intense. I was always drawn to the power of art,” she explains. Her earliest memories are running lines with her mother in her dressing room. “When she did [Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale] at the Globe, I must only have been two – far too young to attend myself. Dad took me to the curtain call as a compromise and I remember watching and hearing the applause for her.” She told her dad then and there: “‘I want to do that’.”
Though they were successful, her parents warned her of the struggle. “I’m so grateful for that now. Studying something else gave me a very different approach and perspective to acting,” she says. Anthropology, after all, is the study of humankind. “What better entry into performing other worlds?”
Parts of her thrived at Oxford University. She relished the amount of research and rigour needed to take it all in and would often end up in the library until 5am. “I’m an all-or-nothing kind of person,” she admits. “Even now, when I do a project, I am drawn into creating the backstory and over-researching.” She made incredible friends, too, and envisaged a career working for the United Nations. But adjusting to the culture at Oxford was hard. “I struggled with how homogenous it was. A very privileged, predominantly white world.” Even on the academic side of her course, which looked at historical anthropology, things felt curiously one-dimensional. “There wasn’t much space for conversations, even within the syllabus, that were ethnically diverse. Our lectures and the texts we were writing were predominantly based on older white men.” She went to Oxford to relish studying the diversity of humankind, only to end up viewing it through the narrowest lens available.
Growing up, both Guyanese and English cultures flowed through the family home, and Richardson-Sellers was encouraged to embrace her whole identity. At 15, she came out as queer. Her parents were supportive, but there had been moments of self-doubt and anxiety. “Then I came out to my agent, maybe at 22, while we were having lunch. I told her: ‘I don’t know what to do!’” she says. “She just said: ‘Maisie, do whatever you want. This is your truth’. Weirdly, it gave me permission to just be myself. I thought about, as a kid, how much I’d have loved to have seen someone like me.”
She considers “queerness” a fitting way to explain the impermanence of both her masculine and feminine qualities. “Sometimes I wake up and feel more masc, some days I’m kind of androgynous or femme,” she says. Sometimes she wakes up and asks herself: “Which part of me is feeling the most fuelled?” Once or twice, she refers to the masculine and feminine as being in oscillation, a movement we typically associate with a pendulum, rocking chair or the Earth moving around the sun. Natural forces at work.
She recently launched a production company, Barefaced Productions, because she wanted to bring more stories by marginalised voices to life. “I want to use the access I have to connect with other filmmakers,” she explains. She co-wrote and directed her first short film, Sunday’s Child, about a first-generation queer woman finding self acceptance. “The crew represented the story being told – 80% were people of colour, 90% were female, including every department head. As a performer, I often found it isolating being the only person with my identity – whether my sexuality or being a person of colour. It can be uncomfortable.”
I ask her what she wants to make next. “I want to make the next Moonlight,” she says. “Story-wise, performance-wise, directing, cinematography… It’s such a stunning story told in such a delicate way, and it steers clear of stereotypes. It’s vulnerable and raw and cinematically pleasing. That’s the kind of filmmaking that I want to do.”
Positive representation can empower people. That’s what she believes. “Often, people who don’t necessarily have the same industry clout or connections can find their stories are taken away and told for them,” she explains. “They lose the power and their agency, and that’s when they become misrepresented and diluted.”
Part of her plight involves standing tall, and she recently extended that to her personal life, too. “I have made the conscious decision to be public about my relationship in the past, because I think positive representation of queer love is important,” she says. I ask about the partner she has been dating and she explains that they’ve actually broken up. “If I’m able to share my love in order to make other people feel empowered…” she drifts for a moment, and smiles. “What a beautiful thing.”
Though she is convincing in The Undeclared War as an American cyber-analyst transplanted to GCHQ, Richardson-Sellers thinks she would make a terrible secret agent. “The problem is, you have to be incredibly secretive,” she explains. “You can’t even tell your partner what you do. At GCHQ, they have a burn bag – nothing can leave the building. No documents. Then you retire and you’re completely cut out from that world. You dedicate your whole life to it and then the door is closed.” She learned this from a deep-dive into intelligence agencies, which involved “looking at official websites, the job criteria. Then researching previous cyber-attacks, their outcomes and the implications of them. Because I didn’t know anything about it, it kind of terrified me. But it’s also very exciting.”
Her character, Kathy, forms a tight bond with codebreaker wunderkind Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown), the show’s protagonist. “It’s a tender, beautiful relationship. They have to make the decision between what they believe is morally correct and what is being asked of them by the government.”
In real life, Boris Johnson’s downfall happened almost concurrently with The Undeclared War’s premiere, in which a fictional Johnson was ousted by fictional politician Andrew Makinde (played by Adrian Lester). “Isn’t that crazy?” she remarks. “There’s an interesting grey area in politics: what is right for the country, and what is right for our political future. The two aren’t always aligned,” she tells me. How do we know? I ask. At the time of our interview, Conservative candidates are popping up left and right, promising to fix the culture they themselves have been enmeshed in.
“I know, right?” she says. “That’s what we need to think about. Who is playing politics like a game? Who is going to retaliate, create more suffering on a large scale for people, purely out of ego? Who is going to be the bigger person, know when to step away from game-playing, make those hard decisions?” I can’t tell if she’s talking about the show she’s starring in, or the real life drama unfolding in front of our eyes. She smiles gently, already thinking about her next leap of faith.
The Undeclared War is available to view now on Channel 4
• This article was amended on 2 August 2022. An earlier version misspelled Peter Kosminsky’s surname as “Kaminsky”, and said that he wrote Wolf Hall when it meant to say he directed it. An incorrect reference to Undeclared War including a plot point about Russia invading Ukraine was also removed, and we clarified a quote in which Maisie Richardson-Sellers recalled watching her mother do “Shakespeare” at the Globe as referring to her being in A Winter’s Tale.
