‘Nanny’ Star Anna Diop Never Expected to Find Such a Meaningful Character to Play

Anna Diop didn’t know when she would be able to represent her own culture onscreen. Then she was cast in Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny. “I’ve never had the chance to play Senegalese, so I’m like, ‘This is bananas,’ ” she recalls. “I didn’t know when in my career that would happen, where I could really show our culture through the person that I’m playing, where it wasn’t something that I needed to hide but rather lean into.” 

In Prime Video’s Nanny, which won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Diop plays Aisha, a nanny for a white New York family trying to raise money to bring her own child from Africa. As Aisha spends more time enduring the microaggressions of her wealthy employers, she is besieged by visions of folkloric creatures, like the water spirit Mami Wata and the trickster god Anansi, that test her already fragile mental state. It’s a role that Diop felt connected to — her mother was a domestic worker — and one that required intense preparation.

Diop had spent three seasons playing a DC superhero on Titans when she came across the script for Nanny. “I desperately needed to do something where I wasn’t wearing 10 pounds of makeup, an 18-pound wig, a 400-pound suit,” she says. “I needed to do something grounded and something that really spoke to the kind of stories that I want to tell, which are stories about women and about issues that I care about.” Diop had heard about Jusu after one of the Titans writers told her that the director was interested in possibly working with her one day. But even though Diop was intrigued after watching Jusu’s 2019 vampire short Suicide by Sunlight, they didn’t connect until Diop started the lengthy process of auditioning for Nanny, which involved multiple chemistry reads over Zoom. 

Because of Titans’ production schedule, Diop had limited time to sit with Nanny before shooting began. From her hotel room in New York, she wrote a whole biography for Aisha and affixed note cards on a corkboard to track the events of scenes as well as what her mental state would be during those moments. She hired a professor of linguistics in Senegal to serve as her dialect coach, paying for his services herself to ensure accuracy in her depiction.

After casting Diop, Jusu refined the material to make Aisha Senegalese to match her star’s background. Diop lived in the West African country until she was 5 before moving to Houston and tried to incorporate as much detail into the film as possible. She had her mother, who was visiting the set, cook the rice and fish dish thieboudienne, which Diop and Rose Decker (who plays Aisha’s young charge) ate on camera. 

Seeing audience reaction to the film has been moving for Diop because of just how personal it is. “It’s my mother’s story. I love my mother, and I’ve always known that she was awesome, and I’ve not seen her depicted,” she says. As for what her mom thought upon seeing the final product? “She’s a woman of few words, but she was very proud of the film,” Diop says. “It was difficult for her because of how the film progresses, but she loved it.” 

Now Diop just wants to keep telling stories that have the same kind of meaning for her. “The project spoiled me because I want to keep doing stuff at this level of artistry and working with filmmakers like Nikyatu,” she says. “It’s set a new bar for me.” 

This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.