SOUTH AFRICAN actress Bonnie Mbuli plays Jasmine Hadley in the BBC’s adaptation of Malorie Blackman’s bestselling book, Noughts & Crosses. Here’s she talks to The Voice about defiantly displaying her natural hair, the power of the series and its profound impact it had on her.

Were you a fan of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts + Crosses books before becoming a part of this project?

I discovered them when I was first asked to come and audition and I promptly went and got myself a book and I started to read them and wow, I was blown away.

I was blown away because coming from South Africa, I can’t say that there is text or literature that truly delves into class and racism in relationships and so articulately and so specifically in South Africa. I just didn’t even think that you could write about it in that way so when I started to encounter the books, it just opened up a whole other world.

Did it have a particularly profound impact on you because of your nationality and South Africa’s history?

Absolutely. I was raised at kind of the trail end of apartheid so I was still growing up in South Africa at a time when cops would raid our house at 2 o’clock in the morning while we’re sleeping, searching for incriminating books or banned literature or pamphlets or whatever it was. I was still growing up in a South Africa where it was very much segregated so Noughts + Crosses has truly been a cathartic experience for me.

I found myself on set some days just sitting in profound silence contemplating what it was like for my parents to live through it. And also just to get the opportunity to look at it from within a relationship perspective and not just politically or socially but from an interpersonal space is really refreshing because then you start to ask yourself questions about how your ideas are formed, how your prejudice is formed or how your fear is formed about other people. Even for me as an actress, this was an educational process.

What impact do you hope it will have on audiences?

I think it goes without saying that it will have different impacts on different audiences in different countries, depending on their history and their politics. But what I hope it does for everyone is it just opens everybody’s eyes to more than just a race debate, more than just a who’s right and who’s wrong; but just takes people to a place of truly going here’s an opportunity for me to, in a non-threatening way, really take a look at how what this has done to other people – and how I can be part of not continuing this way because I now understand and because somebody took the time to actually explain it in a way that doesn’t point fingers that just says, ‘hey, here’s a story and here’s something to consider about what happened to people, about what kind of trauma it caused’.

Also there’s a love story at the core of it, isn’t that beautiful? It’s beautiful, it’s a love story and our own love stories explore so many parts of us. I just think Noughts + Crosses is a gift. For me in my career, it’s truly a gift.

Malorie Blackman wrote the first Noughts & Crosses book 19 years ago. Why do you feel it’s still so relevant today?

I feel it’s relevant today because we can’t truly change the way we think and behave until we understand why we behaved that way in the first place or until we understand why we don’t want to behave like that anymore. It’s relevant because even when I read the books I’m even confronted by things. I’ve been in an interracial relationship and there are things that it articulates that I wasn’t even able to put into words that I would feel sometimes.

Traditional African dress is seen throughout the show. What atmosphere did the clothing create on set?

It was the first time that I noticed that we don’t see ourselves on screens, we don’t see our culture, our things we like, things we’re likely to do, we just don’t see ourselves on screen. We’re not represented that often. Sometimes I’d put on some of the stuff I had to wear for the show and I’d start crying because I just felt seen.

We see that with the prominence of natural black hair in the series as well. When you attend auditions is that how you’d normally present yourself, with your natural hair on display?

I always defiantly go with my natural hair because it’s a statement that I’ve chosen to make and it’s something I’m willing to sacrifice work for because it’s really close to my heart. But I have been pressurised into wearing weaves or wigs and I’ve always stood my ground.

For the first time to be in a show where it was like, well, we want your hair like this because we’re finally coming to the party about making a statement – when I was on the set of Noughts + Crosses it really felt like there was a shift in the world. The fact that this story was being told means that the world is changing.

Tell me about what it was like playing Jasmine Hadley

She’s got a lot going on. She’s very complex and very layered. I absolutely love Jasmine. My thing going in I thought – Jasmine is so many things, she’s gone through so much – which part of her do I latch on to and kind of make it the ground that everything else grows in and I just wanted to humanise her.

I wanted to make her relatable so you didn’t have to have gone through what she went through or experience what she’s experiencing but I wanted the audience to understand, to sympathise with her.

Tell me about a woman who inspires you?

I know this is cliche but it’s certainly my mother. Now that I’m a mother and I’ve played many mothers. I really respect the grace with which she made these sacrifices. And how she might not physically be experiencing some of the glory of it…but she’ll text me and say I’m praying for you and I love you and I hope everything’s OK.

She made sacrifices for this day in my life over time and she had to make them repeatedly even though she didn’t know where it would all end up. And it’s just insane, it’s that feeling like her sacrifices healed future generations in her lineage. I have a lot of respect for her.

Noughts + Crosses is available to watch now on BBC iplayer.