Wunmi Mosaku thought her work was done months ago.
It was just last spring when the “Sinners” star sat before journalists like myself, explaining alongside her co-stars why Ryan Coogler’s audacious Southern vampire thriller starring twin Michael B. Jordans was a must-see for audiences worldwide. It’s an industry routine the 39-year-old has grown accustomed to by now, with over 15 years into the acting game, getting her start in TV shows and films like “Moses Jones” and “I Am Slave” before landing more recent breakthrough roles in “Loki,” “Lovecraft Country” and “We Own This City” (the latter of which helped Coogler cast her in “Sinners”).
But now, thanks to the monumental (commercial and cultural) success of “Sinners,” Mosaku is back in full force on the press circuit for awards season, navigating a part of the industry she hadn’t experienced firsthand until recently but is getting a full-on crash course in. On Wednesday, she notched a supporting actress nod for her turn as Annie, the strong-willed hoodoo healer who anchors the heart of “Sinners.”
“Oh no, this is very new,” Mosaku shared with a laugh when I asked if she’s experienced a buzz quite like this before.
“I’ve always heard about awards season,” she added, “but I didn’t know what it really entailed and the stamina that’s requested of you. I thought the press tour for ‘Sinners’ was the big thing. I thought the whole thing was like, make people come see the film.”
Audiences have done more than that.
Since becoming a box-office smash and a critically acclaimed phenomenon, every symbolic element of “Sinners” has been dissected by film fanatics twice over, from the storied history of the blues nestled in Preacher Boy’s guitar to the time-colliding juke joint montage that’s still the talk of the internet to the Irish dancing vampires scene that Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan called “the most spectacular musical inversion since [Stanley] Kubrick made ‘Singin in the Rain.’”
“Sinners” memes quickly permeated social media after the film’s April release, cementing its place in pop culture almost instantly. Even old Hollywood legends have hailed Coogler’s original opus as a groundbreaking film that “cannot be ignored.”
No matter what, “Sinners” has remained the topic of conversation, and still is, something Mosaku can hardly believe after all this time.
“It’s just a testament to the script Ryan wrote that people feel so passionately about it,” Mosaku explained, “and they love it so much.” So much so that news of the screenplay going public went viral last month, as many things tend to do in the captivating “Sinners” universe.
Mosaku said she “can’t complain” about audiences’ insatiable appetite for the film. Why would she? She and her castmates — Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Jack O’Connell, Omar Benson Miller and Jayme Lawson — can count themselves among the stars of one of 2025’s most talked-about films, one poised to be remembered as one of the decade’s most important, if not already.
“I’m very grateful,” Mosaku added. “Very, very grateful.”
When I speak with Mosaku, we’re a few days removed from Christmas and New Year’s Eve is just around the corner — an apt moment, I note, to take stock of the whirlwind year she’s had following the runaway success of “Sinners.”
“I really have been taking all the moments I possibly can outside of being a mom and working and ‘Sinners’ press and the [awards] campaign,” she told me, snuggled in a cozy jacket at home. “I’ve really been trying to be quiet with it, and reflect and enjoy, but also maintain my energy.”
Mosaku will certainly need plenty of it to carry her through an already-bustling awards season, with “Sinners” one of the top contenders at the major upcoming ceremonies. The film has already picked up several honors, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Casting and Ensemble at the Critics’ Choice Awards. It’s nominated in seven categories at Sunday’s Golden Globes — among them, Best Picture – Drama — and five at SAG’s Actor Awards.
Last month, Mosaku took home a Gotham Award for her searing “Sinners” performance, and now there’s talk of a potential Oscar nomination, which would be a career first.
But accolades aren’t on Mosaku’s mind right now. At least, not during our afternoon Zoom call, as she recalls the goosebumps she got the first time she laid eyes on Coogler’s script for “Sinners” (technically, she only received one scene initially). Still, she knew then and there that the horror flick was something special.
“I mean, I felt that from the moment I read the first scene with Smoke and Annie,” Mosaku said. “I was like, Who writes like this? This is so exquisite. I feel like I know the souls of these characters. I know their griefs, their hopes and joys, their faith, the depth and the capacity of their love in seven pages.”
Mosaku made a point of expressing her reverence for the “Sinners” material to Coogler even before officially landing the role of Annie. Little did she know that the director had already written the character with her in mind after seeing a trailer for HBO’s limited 2022 crime drama “We Own This City.” Even so, Mosaku still went through an audition, which included a chemistry read with Jordan, a process she’s ultimately grateful for because it’s “something that makes me work” and “trust myself a bit more.” Regardless of whether she booked the part, Mosaku had already fallen in love with Smoke and Annie’s deep backstory.
“I think in my first meeting with Ryan, I said to him, ‘Thank you for writing something that has gotten me so excited about this industry again,’” the actor recalled.
Once Coogler finally told Mosaku what “Sinners” was all about — Delta blues! Cursed vampires! Gangster twins! Jim Crow! A one-night-only juke joint! But wait, there’s more! — then the actor was truly blown away.
“I was like, ‘How?! How does this all work?’” Mosaku remembered of her reaction. “When I read the surreal montage scene, I mean, I threw the script down, and I ran into my husband, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. This is amazing. This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever read.’ And I think this is the most amazing thing that I’ve ever been a part of.”
As Mosaku sits back and recaps her “Sinners” experience — from the read-through where Jordan showed up “fully formed” as the Smoke-Stack twins (“I could hear the difference between the two characters”) to listening to Caton’s soul-shaking singing on set to filming on ancestral Southern grounds in New Orleans — she speaks almost with a twinkle in her eye, perhaps because “everything felt magical.”
“I keep saying magical because it just felt like the most amazing time,” Mosaku elaborated, in comparison to some of her past projects. “It felt like everything was conspiring for my nourishment, my joy, my fulfillment, my artistic creativity, my space as a mom, and it just… I loved every second of it.”
Mosaku’s “Sinners” journey would be nothing without the work it took to bring Annie to life. As a conjure woman and healer in the Clarksdale, Mississippi, community, her character plays a vital role when supernatural dangers (aka O’Connell’s Remmick and his gang of vampires) descend upon the twins’ Club Juke and turn it into a deadly bloodbath on opening night. When evil comes knocking (literally), Annie teaches Smoke, Stack and the others how to fight haints with garlic cloves and wooden stakes. Herbs and medicines adorn Annie’s quaint, shaded home, as the resident hoodoo priestess in town. All of this was new to Mosaku and certainly different from the impression mainstream media gave her of the spiritual practices.
“I was thinking of voodoo and witchcraft, and it’s so much more spiritually enlightened than what I had experienced of voodoo and the conjure woman from ‘James Bond’ and ‘The Crucible,’” Mosaku shared. “It was so much more than what I had been fed in the media that I consumed. For me, I played [Annie] and felt like I revered her. There was no judgment.”
“Sinners” gave Mosaku the opportunity to do a lot of learning and unlearning as she prepared her portrayal of Annie, which included many conversations with spiritualists and hoodoo practitioners that helped her realize, “I had been sold a lie.”
Not only did the film expose the Nigerian-born, U.K.-raised actor to a whole new spiritual culture, but it also inspired her to probe its connection to her West African roots, specifically Ifá, a traditional Yoruba religion. And while Mosaku’s deep dive into hoodoo was only intended to inform her of Annie’s background and story, it ultimately gave her a better understanding of herself, both personally and ancestrally.
“I very quickly believed in the power of the conjure woman and their ancestral wisdom and power,” the actor said. “It very much made me go, ‘Oh, wait, there is more than what I’ve been told.’”
According to Mosaku, the desire to explore those unknowns has only grown since filming “Sinners.” Part of it goes back to the actor’s childhood, when she and her parents immigrated from Zaria, Nigeria — “a country that was colonized,” she noted — to Manchester, England, when she was barely 2 years old.
“My desire is to learn about what we lost in that colonization,” Mosaku said. “I lost a lot of it through being moved to England when I was one and a half, and so I want to know more. I want to reconnect to my mother tongue. I want to know the ancestral wisdom that I have been disconnected from. I want to reconnect.”
That’s been part of the gift of playing Annie. Such a dynamic character has urged Mosaku to reclaim pieces of herself in ways she never expected, with a powerful arc that resonated deeply with the actor. Thanks to that personal awakening, Annie has also given her the role of a lifetime.
Annie isn’t Mosaku’s first run at portraying a richly drawn character. Her scene-stealing turn in “Lovecraft Country” as Ruby Baptiste, who, at one point, drinks a race-swapping potion in pursuit of a dream retail job and the privileges denied to her, ranks among her most potent performances to date. So does her role in Remi Weekes’ horror debut “His House,” where a refugee couple escapes violence in South Sudan, only to find their fresh start haunted by a sinister force.
“I definitely feel like Rial in ‘His House’ was a very complicated character,” Mosaku remarked. “It was a complicated script, emotionally.”
Still, Mosaku makes it clear that Annie, who helped her discover a new internal power through research alone, is in a league of her own.
“Annie feels kind of super in a way,” she said, “like her wisdom, strength, love, knowledge and power. She seems elevated from just human, even though she is very much human, but she’s so connected to the earth, the stars and the other worlds. I don’t think there’s anyone who I’ve played before that felt as superhuman as her.”
As much as Mosaku’s character left a profound imprint on her, she’s had an even greater resonance with audiences, who continue to laud the actor’s compelling portrayal. From acting as Smoke’s protector — both up close and from afar, thanks to the mojo bag she gave him (her Elijah) years earlier — to grappling with the grief of losing their child, to finding solace through intimacy in one steamy love scene with Smoke (a rare onscreen moment for a curvy dark-skinned Black woman), to bravely standing in the line of fire during the vampire invasion and ultimately sacrificing herself, viewers witnessed Annie’s tender moments alongside her unyielding strength. Those characteristics, Mosaku has heard from fans, particularly women, struck a chord that’s stuck with them since, and it’s made her role feel all the more “healing.”
“I think healing for myself because of those conversations,” Mosaku explained. “Sometimes it just feels a little lonely out there. Like you’re the only one who feels like this, or gets treated like this, or sometimes it feels like things are just not very fair, and they’re not.”
“Hearing women say they feel seen, loved, lovable, powerful, connected, reconnected, exploring all sides of their personhood, it feels healing because it makes you feel like you’re not alone in this experience,” she added. “It felt like a really beautiful, harmonious chorus of people saying, ‘I feel seen, I feel loved, I feel valued.’ It felt like we were singing the same song.”
Mosaku is no longer the same person she was before “Sinners.” She has Coogler and his award-winning screenplay to thank for that. But the prolific director — only five feature films into his career following “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed,” “Black Panther” and “Wakanda Forever” — is still just getting started. After shaking up Hollywood and pop culture at large with his boldest work to date, Mosaku is eager to see the history Coogler will continue to write.
“He has such a sacred gift and responsibility in preserving, representing, loving our culture, the diaspora and the truth,” Mosaku praised the filmmaker, though she acknowledged, “that feels very weighty.”
She continued: “He loves what he does. I want him to continue making the things that make his heart pound with excitement, but I also feel like it’s a lot. I always say about him and Michael [B. Jordan], I want them to be able to rest, but I don’t know if that’s something that they’ll ever feel able to do, because I feel like the responsibility feels so great. But I just want [Ryan] to get all his flowers. I feel like he’s our greatest, I do. I think he’s our greatest director and writer. I think he’s one of our greatest human beings; just a good person who loves what he does. He loves his family, he loves his city, he loves his people and he loves the truth.”
“When you think about the people who are in charge and the people who have the loudest voices, it feels like, do they really have any of that? I want his voice to be the loudest,” Mosaku added. “I think through art, it is. It’s evident from how many people turned up and loved the movie and are still talking about it. I just want him to feel fulfilled and feel like he’s growing in the way he helps others to grow. I want him to feel however he wants to feel, to be honest, because his intentions are pure.”
Mosaku can personally attest to the latter, having been entrusted to play such a commanding part that Coogler crafted specifically for her. The actor believes it was wise of the director to wait until the final day of filming to reveal that tidbit to her, joking, “There might have been a little arrogance” if she had known earlier. Even so, Mosaku is thankful for every aspect of the journey, from the research and preparation to the long, demanding work and, most importantly, the personal growth that came with it.
“I’ve been surrounded by incredible actors on this job that now if Ryan told me that and offered me a role without an audition, I’ve now experienced that level of intense character work and quality, and because of the kind of person Ryan is, I don’t think you can sit on your laurels.”
It’s hard for Mosaku to say if any other characters since “Sinners” have rivaled the challenge and reward of Annie, though she notes her role in a forthcoming film adaptation of Neil LaBute’s play “This Is How It Goes,” directed by and starring Idris Elba, comes pretty close.
“It was a really challenging movie because of everything I’d learned from Annie,” she said. “[Me and this character] were just so opposite, and it was very triggering for me. It was like therapy, actually, because I had to interrogate myself and my judgment and the why.”
Still, for Mosaku, her “Sinners” character may always remain in a category of her own.
“I feel like Annie’s just on a different planet for me, personally,” she concluded. “She’s like a guiding light for me now. Forever, she will be.”
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