NATHALIE EMMANUEL had just done her supermarket shopping when she got the life-changing call.
It was her agent, phoning to say she’d got the part of Missandei in Game Of Thrones.
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Nathalie burst into tears, dropped her bags in shock, smashing jars and bottles, and said into her mobile: “This is MINE.”
The actress never had any doubt she was destined for great things — even though her mum had to work part-time as a cleaner to pay for her acting lessons.
Nathalie told all about her humble beginnings as her sexy new Dracula film The Invitation, in which she has a starring role, opens in cinemas.
When she got that life-changing call in 2013, her last acting job was four years playing Sasha Valentine in Hollyoaks and she was having to work in a shop of trendy clothing chain Hollister.
She was on the verge of giving up acting and going back to college when her phone rang.
The 33-year-old said: “Game Of Thrones was a game changer for me. I had been to get my shopping and was walking home to my flat
“As I came into my building I got a call from my agent and she was like, ‘Nathalie, you’ve got it’.
“I’d just auditioned for a well-paying advert so I was like, ‘Oh great, I don’t have to worry about the bills for a month. When should I come to London?’
“She said, ‘You mean Belfast, you got Game Of Thrones’.
“I dropped all my shopping, I broke jars, I cried. I had tears of joy, it was so amazing and re-ignited something in me.”
FUN HOBBY
Nathalie has never looked back. By 2015 she was a regular cast member on the worldwide HBO hit, playing Missandei, a young slave working as an interpreter for Emilia Clarke’s Daenerys Targaryen.
The role made her a household name in the US, where people started approaching her in supermarkets wanting to talk about her character.
Her role was also a game changer for the TV industry.
Nathalie said: “I was a fan of the show.
“I annoyed my agent for a while about getting an audition but I didn’t actually think that was possible.
“It’s been spoken of widely how they didn’t cast people of colour in regular leading roles so when the opportunity came I was like, ‘This is mine!’
“But then it dawned on me that I actually had to do it. I was so excited and terrified.”
Nathalie was born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, the second child of a half-Dominican mother and a half-St Lucian father.
She says she only got into acting from the age of three with her big sister Louise because her mum was so fed up of her crying.
Natalie said: “Acting started off as a fun hobby that my mum got us into.
“She wanted us to have extracurricular things and I was a really shy kid with attachment issues.
It’s been spoken of widely how they didn’t cast people of colour in regular leading roles so when the opportunity came I was like, ‘This is mine!’
“If she dropped me at school I didn’t want to be away from her.
“I was a needy, crying child and it was an effort to help me build confidence away from her. I think she felt, ‘I need to do something with this child’.
“We got into it young and it was fun. My mum is not a show mum. It was such a joy for us both.
“It became a bit of an obsession and we wanted to audition for everything in our local area.
“My first professional job was when I was five, an advert for a British Airways duty free thing that used to play on aeroplanes.
“My nan lived in St Lucia at the time and she would see it when she flew back and forth.
“I had to be asleep with a toy and roll over when the director told me to and I would not keep my eyes closed.
“He said, ‘You have to keep your eyes closed until I say cut’. And I just would not do it.
“He said, ‘If you do it, you can keep the toy’.
“I was like, ‘Hmmm, interesting, I see that you have a second one over there. I’d like to take that for my sister’.
“They said, ‘Yeah, all right’. It was my first job and I negotiated my own terms, apparently.”
Nathalie’s parents used to take her back and forth from Essex to London on the train for auditions.
The hard work paid off when she won a part in West End musical The Lion King in her final year of primary school, as she was about to take the 11-plus exam.
Nathalie said: “My mum had multiple jobs when we were growing up, to allow us to do acting and dance.
Acting started off as a fun hobby that my mum got us into.
When she was 17, Nathalie dropped out of school and moved to Liverpool to play Sasha Valentine in Hollyoaks.
Her mum was not keen on her giving up education, but she told her daughter: “I can’t stop you.”
Nathalie was on the soap for four years until 2010 and is reported to have dated co-star Devon Anderson until around 2017.
She said she has never regretted taking the part.
Nathalie added: “It felt like an opportunity for me to figure out what kind of actor I was and whether I was any good. I was learning.
“I had the opportunity to play a range of things.
“My character’s mum was killed in a hit-and-run and she went through love and heartbreak and drug addiction and all of that.
“I had opportunities to do comedic stuff and play a villain.
“I learned how to build a person, and it was a fundamental experience for me. It gave me tools that I still use today.”
But after she left Hollyoaks in 2010 the work dried up, hence her thoughts about quitting acting before the Game Of Thrones job came up.
She said: “At the time I had been thinking of going back to school because I felt, ‘No one wants to hire me and I’m not sure how long I can do this zero-hours retail job.
“‘I’m not learning anything and mostly just managing my behaviour with rude customers’. It was soul- destroying.”
Nathalie, speaking on the Happy Sad Confused and Life In Film podcasts, was at the centre of a controversy when her GoT character was killed off in 2019.
Fans accused producers of “fridging” — sacrificing a female or ethnic minority character to further a plot involving a white male.
Nathalie says she is glad the scene “sparked a wider conversation”.
Today she is dating actor Alex Lanipekun, 41, who she has been with since 2018.
She still lives down the road from her mum and says she is happiest around people who know her as “Nats from Southend”.
In The Invitation she plays American Evie, who a mysterious cousin invites to a wedding in Britain.
She said: “Vampires are such a fascinating idea. They’re sexy, they’re violent. There’s immortality, power.
“I was always really into them. Vampires are always fabulous — they’ve got the threads, they’ve got the castle.”
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