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Des, whom Agyepong plays in Benedict Lombe’s romantic two-hander “Shifters,” is a painter who is unapologetically herself—much like Agyepong was growing up in South London. “She doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions. She’s into her own gaze, which, in my artwork—that’s me all over,” Agyepong says.
“I remember telling everyone, ‘Isn’t this magic? ’” she says.
“It blew me away, something about a human transforming. I found it mesmerizing. ”, opposite Daniel Ezra. It’s an intimate story about a young Black couple who reunite after eight years apart.
If there are no epic human transformations, there’s something equally magical at play.
“Two characters, both Black, both 32 and in love. These shows don’t often happen,” Agyepong says.
“It’s not just about the love story. It’s about everything else, too: life, loss, getting the job, not getting the job, someone feeling further ahead, all of those other things that inform the relationship. It is jagged and all over the place. That’s what love is, though.
” To get into the right mindset, she drew from films like. After a sold-out run at the Bush Theatre in London, the show transferred to the West End before coming to New York City’sDes, Agyepong’s character, is a painter who is unapologetically herself, much like Agyepong was as a kid growing up in South London.
“She doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions. She’s into her own gaze, which, in my artwork—that’s me all over,” she says. Agyepong, an actress and visual artist, didn’t imagine a creative career for herself early on. But at 15—a transformative year, it turns out—she had a drama teacher, “Mr. Lord,” who saw her innate talent.
“He was a godsend. He really spoke life into me,” she says. Now, decades later, he attends her show openings. She has always admired—and striven to emulate—the work ethic of her parents, both Ghanaian immigrants; Agyepong’s father was a manager in the Harrods seafood department and her mother worked for the NHS.
“They showed how much they loved us with how much they worked,” she says. “I wanted to make sure I was grafting and not taking their sacrifices for granted…I think that’s the dilemma sometimes with second-generation kids. ” Agyepong picked up a camera at 19, after her first year studying psychology at the University of Kent, and found her voice in the medium.
At first, it helped her to process her emotions and address her mental health, making visible “different parts of , either to help accept them or understand that they have no power over me. ” Drawing from the likes of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Søren Kierkegaard, her work continues to maintain a psychological underpinning of exploring the self.
, focused on women from history whom she felt were forgotten or ignored, using their lives as a template to explore her own.
“I wanted to see images of Black women that are fragile and delicate and exposed. It was such a leap of faith,” she says. , a cathartic body of work based on Jung’s concept of the shadow self.
“We all have these repressed parts of ourselves that are deemed wrong or ignored or buried,” Agyepong says. Visually, she was drawn to “the idea of revelation and truth-telling being seen as blue on Black skin,” inspired by Barry Jenkins’sWhen working on these projects, she says, “I’m more myself than I am in real life. The camera feels like such a caring, empathetic lens. ” That empathy has extended to her acting work.
At 25, she made her theatrical debut in Theresa Ikoko’sat the Talawa Theatre Company in Croydon and signed with an agent soon after. That’s when she began juggling photography and acting—and never really stopped.
“When I appeared as an actor, a lot of people were like, ‘Well, who are you? You can’t be both. ’ When I dropped one, I really desired the other. ” As it turns out, Agyepong decided, “I’m just an artist.
I work in these different mediums. ”at the Bush, Agyepong felt a responsibility to be perfect, having seen so few Black women in leading roles in the theater.
“You don’t want to let anyone down because we don’t often see us on stage,” she says. “However, that perfectionism can really rob your joy. ” Des—whom she describes as “a quirky, messy, dark-skinned girl with Afro hair”—was a unique invention, and it was Agyepong’s job simply to honor that singularity.
“I was like,What’s in Jung Kook’s Bag? Crème Brûlée and Candy, a weekly podcast featuring the most exciting stories and hot takes from the worlds of culture, politics, sports and–of course–fashion
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