Jimoh, Toheeb (1997- )

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    ‘Player Kings’ Review: Ian McKellen’s Juicy Assignment as Falstaff

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    In Robert Icke’s adaptation of Parts 1 and 2 of “Henry IV,” the veteran stage actor’s performance belies his age.There are two shows for the price of one at “Player Kings,” in which the director Robert Icke has combined both of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” history plays into a self-contained whole.The production offers a compressed version of the royal accession story that, in this version, runs nearly four hours. It is an opportunity to experience Ian McKellen’s unbridled love of performance. At 84, the production’s leading man possesses an energy and vigor that belie his years.“Player Kings” — which runs at the Noël Coward Theater through June 22, before touring England — is the latest in a wave of recent high-profile Shakespeare productions in London. Uniquely among the other great British theater actors of his generation, McKellen still returns year after year to the stage, recently tackling Lear for a second time and playing an octogenarian Hamlet.Perhaps inevitably, there’s a feeling of the star vehicle to this production. In the “sweet creature of bombast” that is this play’s John Falstaff, McKellen has an especially juicy assignment — an outsized character whose appetite for life matches the actor’s own gusto. We’re told that the ample Falstaff hasn’t seen his own knees in years, and when he sits, it looks as if he may never stand up. His mouth, however, seems always in motion, as if chewing food for constant fuel.He’s also a necessary soul mate to the carousing, drug-using Prince Hal (the excellent Toheeb Jimoh, an Emmy nominee for “Ted Lasso”), whose coming-of-age story — becoming, as he puts it, “more myself” — connects these two “Henry IV” plays. But the roustabout Hal’s dawning maturity costs him the companion he once held dear.Clare Perkins as Mistress Quickly and Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Hal.Manuel HarlanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      in Theater

      ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Review: Toheeb Jimoh Shines

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      Toheeb Jimoh, Emmy-nominated for “Ted Lasso,” takes on Romeo in a riveting production from the British director Rebecca Frecknall.“Is love a tender thing?” Romeo asks early in the Shakespeare tragedy to which he and Juliet give their names. Not so much, according to the raw and riveting new production of “Romeo and Juliet” that opened Wednesday at the Almeida Theater here.It’s no surprise that the courtship between the noble Romeo — here played by the sweet-faced Toheeb Jimoh, from TV’s “Ted Lasso” — and the teenage Juliet will end in calamity. But this production from Rebecca Frecknall — the buzzy British director whose shows tend to scoop up Olivier awards — treats the often overly familiar play as if it were entirely fresh, and the result is astonishing.Filleting the text by nearly an hour so that it actually does equate to the Chorus’s promised “two hours’ traffic of our stage,” Frecknall brings to her first professional foray into Shakespeare the same pared-back, scalpel-sharp precision she has previously applied to Tennessee Williams and her still-running West End revival of “Cabaret,” which is rumored to be heading to New York next spring.Her “Romeo and Juliet,” performed without an intermission, begins with the cast clawing feverishly at a stage wall, onto which are projected crucial lines from the prologue. But as if in haste to get straight to the meat of the play, the wall soon collapses to reveal the citizenry of Verona mid-combat. Danger, you feel from the start, is the default mode of a contemporary-seeming milieu amid which Juliet is described by her father as “a stranger in the world.” That is perhaps because she hasn’t yet experienced life’s abrasions; such an awareness will come — and how — with time.“These violent delights have violent ends,” notes Friar Lawrence (the excellent Paul Higgins), in arguably the most prescient remark in the play. Barely have Romeo and Juliet been introduced before their existence seems threatened at every turn. At one point the Nurse (a booted Jo McInnes, herself a fine director) sits with her face in her hands, fearing the worst.Rebecca Frecknall, the play’s director, has a background in movement, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels halfway toward dance-theater.Marc BrennerElsewhere, Juliet’s father remarks to his daughter’s intended, Paris, that “we were born to die”— a comment that in this context has the force of prophecy. Jamie Ballard brings to Lord Capulet a roiling fury that seems to catch even his own wife off guard. What sort of father would deride his only child as “one too much?”Amid such a toxic family, you can well imagine Juliet wanting the quickest way out, and Frecknall makes us aware of how the play is alive to the passage of time. “Wednesday’s tomorrow,” the Friar says in passing, noting a remorseless speed that seems to take everyone by surprise. The Friar is equally alert to the danger inherent in such impetuosity: “They stumble that run fast,” he cautions as the lovers hurtle toward the abyss.Frecknall has a background in movement, and her “Romeo and Juliet” often feels halfway toward dance-theater, including generous borrowings from Prokofiev’s celebrated ballet score for this very play.A male ensemble, including key characters like Benvolio (Miles Barrow) and Jyuddah Jaymes’s feral Tybalt, moves in undulating rhythms, dropping to the floor of Chloe Lamford’s set and back up again. Jonathan Holby’s fight direction introduces a gun into the arsenal of knives that does away with Jack Riddiford’s charismatic Mercutio, here an insolent provocateur who has barely spoken the Queen Mab speech before he disappears. The rules governing this fearsome group of men render no one safe amid the comparably merciless glare of Lee Curran’s shifting bank of lights toward the rear of the stage.The fast-rising Jimoh, a 2022 Emmy nominee, brings to the stage the same ready likability familiar from his turn as Sam Obisanya in “Ted Lasso.” What astonishes here is the ease with which he emotionally opens himself up to Juliet, only to realize too late that the options available to this couple are running out. It’s fascinating, too, to see the balcony scene reconfigured so that Romeo is perched atop a ladder addressing Juliet center-stage, flipping the play’s iconic imagery.Jimoh brings the same ready likability to the stage that earned him an Emmy nomination last year for his role in the TV show “Ted Lasso.” Marc BrennerReferencing “this world-wearied flesh,” Jimoh’s Romeo sounds like an embryonic Hamlet. Hainsworth, for her part, played Hermia, a young lover with a similarly unforgiving father in the Bridge Theater’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” several years ago. Juliet is a far larger role, and the actress sometimes disappears so far inside her character’s grief that the language itself gets muddied, or lost. (Hainsworth will reunite with Frecknall in an adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba” for the National Theater in November.)But I’ve rarely heard an audience as attentive as the Almeida’s was when Hainsworth’s guttural sorrow gave way to a startlingly vivid suicide, from which several playgoers around me visibly recoiled.You may not be surprised to learn that Frecknall closes the play with Juliet’s despairing deed. Once you’ve restored death’s sting, all that’s left is silence.Romeo and JulietThrough July 29 at the Almeida Theater in London; https://almeida.co.uk/ More

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      in Television

      Toheeb Jimoh on ‘Ted Lasso’ and His Pretty Good Few Years

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      In the Season 2 finale of “Ted Lasso,” Toheeb Jimoh’s character, Sam Obisanya, stands in front of the vacant storefront he has just bought. “What’s it going to be?” asks the woman who has handed the soccer player his keys. “A Nigerian restaurant,” he says, a broad smile on his face. This moment is a turning point of sorts for Sam, a mark of his ambition and growth from the young man viewers met in the “Ted Lasso” pilot who had recently arrived in Britain.So it’s fitting that Jimoh, 25, chose Enish, a West African restaurant in Brixton, in South London, a stone’s throw from the actor’s childhood home, for an interview. Dressed in a black sweater and matching cargo pants and tucking into rice and ayamase, a spicy meat stew, Jimoh said that Sam has had a “beautiful arc” over the past two seasons.“If you had told me at the start of Season 1 that Sam would be a business owner, one of the stars of the team, and dating the boss, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. Sam has also gone from a minor character to one of the show’s leads, with his positive attitude and strong work ethic making him a favorite among fans.The past couple of years have been pretty good to Jimoh, too, who graduated from drama school in 2018. Last year he was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Sam, and this month he can be seen onscreen in two major TV shows: the third season of “Ted Lasso,” which started airing on Apple TV+ on March 15, and “The Power,” adapted from the British writer Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel of the same name, which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on March 31.In the upcoming Amazon Prime Video show “The Power,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian journalist.Amazon Prime Video“The Power” is a science fiction drama that considers what would happen if women became more physically dominant than men. Jimoh plays Tunde, a young journalist documenting the revolutions that come as women gain new strength, and his character embodies the vulnerability of men in the face of this female power.Tim Bricknell, an executive producer on “The Power,” said in a recent interview that there were two sides of Jimoh “that made him perfect for this particular role.” The first, he said, is the actor’s “natural charm,” which is integral to Tunde’s character. But the second is Jimoh’s curiosity. “He wants to know what everybody on the crew is doing and is always asking questions,” Bricknell said. “That is quite rare in successful young actors, which makes him perfect for playing a journalist.”In preparing for the role, Jimoh spoke to his female friends “about routine things that they do to make sure that they’re safe when they go out,” he said. “I was a bit sheepish because I hadn’t realized that.” He sees the book and the TV adaptation as containing “many really interesting questions about the relationships between men and women, society’s relationship with power and how power corrupts people.”In both “The Power” and “Ted Lasso,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian. The actor — whose parents are Nigerian and who spent some time in the country when he was growing up — is attracted to roles like these that allow him to “speak about my family and culture,” he said. But he also likes to choose roles that explore wider societal topics. His first major acting role came in 2020, when he starred in “Anthony,” a 90-minute BBC drama about  Anthony Walker, a teenager who was killed in a racist attack in England in 2005.“You can tell from the roles I’ve ended up doing in my career that I was also a kid who would have done politics if I wasn’t an actor,” Jimoh said.To become an actor, “I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesHe studied politics in his final years of high school, along with law and history, with acting as his “easy subject on the side,” he said. He didn’t consider it as a career option until a teacher pulled him aside to suggest he could be an actor.“I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said. He didn’t know anyone in the acting world, and his parents both worked in hospitals — his father as a caterer and his mother as a health care assistant. “All the grown ups that I knew had very, very normal jobs, and that was the blueprint,” he said.Soon he was performing in youth productions and had a gig as an usher at the Young Vic theater. One day, sitting across from his friend at school during a lunch break, Jimoh threw his history homework in the trash and decided to pursue acting seriously. “I refused to have a Plan B,” he said, adding that he “harassed my teachers into watching my audition speeches.”In a school newsletter at the time, one of Jimoh’s teachers wrote that, “In all the years that I have been teaching, never have I come across someone who has such raw talent at such an early age” as Jimoh.He went on to get an undergraduate degree in drama from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which has an abundance of high-profile alumni, including Orlando Bloom and Michaela Coel.Sam (Jimoh) and Roy (Brett Goldstein) in “Ted Lasso.” Goldstein said Jimoh had “integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Apple TV+The actor and comedian Brett Goldstein, who plays the former soccer player Roy Kent on “Ted Lasso” and is now a close friend of Jimoh’s, said he believed that the younger actor’s success was partly because of his selective approach to work. “He turns down as much as he takes,” Goldstein, 42, said in a recent interview. “He has integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Between bites of ayamase, Jimoh said he hoped future opportunities would allow him to show different sides of himself. “I’m just interested in what the story is for that young man, and why it is interesting to tell,” he said of how he chooses his gigs. “There’s a plethora of work out there, and I just want to dip my toe in everything.”From June, he will be starring in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” at London’s Almeida Theater. He sees the play’s meaning as rooted in “believing young people and their feelings,” noting that he had a friend who died by suicide when he was 15.“When you’re young, you feel things so deeply,” he said, “and older people might look at that and think it’s a bit naïve, but it leads to stuff like this.”At the moment, Jimoh said he often finds himself having to perform like Sam when he meets people who recognize him from the show.“But there is more to me than the squeaky clean ‘Ted Lasso,’” he said, “and I’m excited to show that part of me as well.” More