Omari douglas gay
Life is a cabaret for It’s a Sin’s Omari Douglas
How gratifying was it for you that It’s a Sin had that positive, real-world impact?
It was just overwhelming. We never expected the demonstrate to have that kind of response. It’s one thing for an audience to engage with the characters and to decline in love with them. But when it reaches out [like that]… The fact that those HIV testing figures just soared, that’s a response that stepped into another realm. It hit a broader societal [moment] – it felt like a bit of a movement.
There was also the educational element of the show. A lot of viewers had no idea what the onslaught of HIV/AIDS was appreciate , or what the social and political response was.
It’s particularly brilliant because there’s a whole generation of people who didn’t even comprehend that this part of our history existed. When I think about being a kid at school, if I had seen anything remotely to do with gay or gay culture on television, there’s no way that I would have spoken to anyone about it in the pla
Omari Douglas on It&#;s A Sin, the s era drama about AIDS and the euphoric bliss of queer love
I was shocked to learn that this was your first screen role and to have so many scenes with the iconic Stephen Fry. What that was like for you?
It was so fun! Before we started shooting we went for a cup of tea, and we chatted a lot. He wanted to locate out about me and was really interested in my response to creature in the production and learning about everything because it was everything that he lived through. And he was telling me some really harrowing stories. When he rewrote Me and My Girl, which obviously was a enormous success in London, and then went to Broadway. He was telling me about how he went to travel and visit the show on Broadway and so many guys in the ensemble of that show had passed away by the time that he&#;d gone back. It’s weird for me because I reach from a musical theater background. So it&#;s weird thinking about just how much of a dramatic effect the virus had on a community where all my groundwork. So that really brought it home.
But when we got into filming, I kept thinkin
TBB TALKS TO… OMARI DOUGLAS STAR OF NEW Queer DRAMA ‘RUSH’
Omari Douglas’ calendar has been full of bookings since he graduated from Arts Educational Schools, London in
From acting in Clarke Peters’ iconic musical, Five Guys Named Moe, to starring as Nora in Emma Rice’s Wise Children at The Old Vic, we spoke to him monitoring the recent release of Willi Richards’ Rush via BBC iPlayer’s Culture in Quarantine series.
Rush, which follows a male lover love triangle between Bloke, Lad and Boy, is one of several novel LGBTQ+ works added to Culture in Quarantine as a result of lockdown restrictions causing the cancellation of Pride events.
Hi Omari, since you graduated from drama school in , you’ve worked on a number of projects – particularly musicals. Growing up, were you always enthralled by the world of musical theatre?
Absolutely! I’ve had a strong connection with music for as distant as I can retain and I think that was probably the catalyst for my journey into theatre. It was cute amazing to discover all these shows where song is the driving oblige. I took part i
Omari Douglas: what It's A Sin debunks about AIDS and what still needs to change
Omari Douglas was never taught about HIV or AIDS at academy. It's a shocking but all-too-common truth among many who didn't live through the eighties, and it's exactly why shows such as It's A Sin - Channel 4's brand-new hit series - are so important.
Douglas plays the vibrantly brave character Roscoe in the five-part drama, which depicts the lives of a group of gay men and their friends between and As the decade unfolds, they are forced to reconcile with the AIDS epidemic, a new deadly disease that has made its way over from the US to the UK.
“With my sex learning at school, I don’t remember hearing the synonyms 'AIDS',” Douglas tells me over Zoom on a snowy Friday. “If HIV was mentioned, it was very vague. It’s the lasting effect of stigmas; if you have a generation of teachers or workers that still keep that stigma, then it’s not spoken about. It’s just ignored, passing down this idea that we have to sweep certain things under the carpet.”
Douglas adds that Gay education should not be lim