From Cartoon Binges To Oscar Shouts: How Kelechi Udegbe Became Nollywood’s Finest Character Actor

The year was 2006, and I was home for the secondary school holidays; I was in SS3, and boarding school was arduous. As with most middle-class families, we had cable TV, but we still tuned in to NTA on Thursday nights.

Wale Adenuga Productions had the local audience hooked on its anthology drama series Super Story, and the show was in its 9th season, Behind the Smile, a campus tale involving a young woman at the mercy of her lover-turned-blackmailer. The season’s antagonist, the manipulative, charismatic and sinister Kunle, was played by a certain gap-toothed, oft-smirking young actor named Kelechi Udegbe. His interpretation of the role was so brilliant that when his character was run over by Sade (the season’s protagonist played by Pat Gary-Ayenor), there was a collective gasp of relief across Nairaland forums that had been engaging the show.

Udegbe’s performance was so convincing that it impressed his younger sister, who was usually hard to please. “If she tells you that you are good, then you are good, and if she feels otherwise, she would make her feelings known. She doesn’t mince words”, Udegbe tells me over a WhatsApp call whose flow was eased by a Thursday afternoon traffic jam in Lagos. “While the show was going on, she reached out to me after one of the episodes and said, ‘KC, you can act o.’ I was so elated, I asked her to say it again. It felt like music to my ears.” 

There are people in the film industry who nursed aspirations to take on core “professional” endeavors, like medicine, in their childhood, but Udegbe is not one of those. For him, the desire to venture into entertainment had been present from the moment he could piece words together. Being an introvert, he found solace in cartoons and drawings. He was so enthralled by the films he watched on his family’s VCR player that he would repeat lines from memorable scenes and improvise characters inside the house. He found himself drawn to the performances, mannerisms and gimmicks of actors like Martin Lawrence, Will Smith, Eddie Murphy and Denzel Washington. Mainstream Nollywood was navigating its first iteration in the 1990s, and he also found worthy role models in Ramsey Nouah and Richard Mofe-Damijo (alongside whom he would appear decades later in The Black Book).

Things could have been a lot different for Udegbe, and there’s a chance that he would have been another kind of performer altogether. He tried his hands at music for a few years, and was in fact part of a three-man band, but, feeling hard done by because he provided all the finances for promotion and contributed the most creatively, he hung up his microphone before long.

Udegbe knew that he needed to polish his gait and social skills if he was going to pursue a film career, so in 2005, he enrolled in the Pencil Film and Television Institute (PEFTI) in Lagos. “I knew that I wanted to act, but I didn’t know how to master poise and stand in front of the camera, so I attended PEFTI for three months, just to have a hang of what it entailed to get into character for a role. This was particularly important for me, because by nature, I’m a very shy person. Most of the guys that know me from way back are surprised by my career trajectory because I even struggled to talk to girls in secondary school.” Not long after completing the course at PEFTI, an opportunity came which he grabbed with both hands, and Kunle, his character in Behind the Smile was born.

In perfect circumstances, a brilliant showing of that nature (as he displayed on the show) should have been the start of a successful career as a leading man in an industry that was slowly regaining steam in the late 2000s after things had ground to a halt a few years earlier (no thanks to the standoff between film marketers and certain A-list actors), but the flowers were slow in coming. Sure enough, there were a few shouts—in 2015 and 2016, he bagged consecutive nominations for Best Actor in a Comedy at the Africa Magic Viewers Choice Awards (AMVCAs) for his role in the Ndani TV series Officer Titus—but anyone who looked closely could tell that the lights never quite beamed on him.

The past twenty-four months, however, have witnessed a marginal boost in Udegebe’s profile. In 2021, he clinched the award for Best Actor at the Africa Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) for his role as Officer Magnus in Bolanle Austen-Peters’ Collision Course, and he has featured in films that have enjoyed positive critical reception, including Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (2021), Jade Osiberu’s The Trade (2023) and Editi Effiong’s The Black Book (2023). But his biggest win yet is the runaway success of C.J Obasi’s black-and-white fantasy film Mami Wata, where he plays the malevolent Jabi, and also serves as one of its executive producers. Since its debut at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year, the film has screened in several countries, with reviews overwhelmingly positive, and in spite of its poor commercial reception at local cinemas, it has been submitted as Nigeria’s official entry in the International Feature Film category of next year’s Academy Awards.

Udegbe has been fondly nicknamed “The Performer,” and has been compared to some of Hollywood’s finer character actors like William Ficthner and John Cazale. In a scene in The Black Book, where he kills off a character played by Olumide Oworu, Udegbe’s ability to own the screen shines the brightest. He says little, and in a low-pitched voice, but his menacing demeanor typifies unbridled evil. He winds up as the catalyst for the protagonist’s revenge mission, and his cold stare makes his character easy to loathe, but it is the plausibility of his performance that makes him a great actor. 

When I ask him about the theories surrounding his pickiness with roles, he does not deny it and explains that he frequently strives to make his characters as memorable as possible, fondly recalling his brief but impactful appearance as the Vice-President of the Secret Society in Abba Makama’s The Lost Okoroshi (2019). “Sometimes when you read a script, there are characters that are clearly defined and fleshed out, and there are others that may require you to work harder in getting life out of them. When I am picked for a role, especially one that is not defined in the screenplay, I challenge myself to prove a point.” No one enjoys being earmarked for a lead role only to give it up to a more popular actor, but Udegbe is not salty about it when recounting some of his on-set experiences. In his view, there are no “small roles,” and he alludes to several occasions where directors have expressed gratitude to him for brilliant interpretations of supporting characters.

The conversation moves from his roles in lesser-heralded films like Tope Alake’s Nimbe (2019) and Imoh Umoren’s The Herbert Macaulay Affair (2019), to his more recent appearances, particularly in Eyimofe and Mami Wata. He agrees that Nigerian arthouse films are getting some recognition, but bemoans the absence of a level playing field in terms of promotion, citing the time slots and short cinema run accorded to Mami Wata. He also advocates for distributors to provide equal platforming for arthouse films, and for gatekeepers to stop dictating for moviegoers. “We keep forgetting that audiences are diverse. These days we keep hearing that ‘Nigerians just want to laugh’, but the local programs I watched growing up were not necessarily comedy shows. Ripples and Cockcrow at Dawn didn’t have us rolling on the floor, but they were excellent nonetheless. I’ve heard people complain that our flicks are becoming watery amidst recycled storylines; they want something different and fresh. Let the audience be allowed to choose what they want to watch.”

The last few minutes of the call have us delving into a small debate. Udegbe admits to keeping tabs on social media debates surrounding the quality of actors and performers across different generations of Nollywood and acknowledges the gulf in class. He attributes this to a lower barrier for entry into today’s film ecosystem compared to previous eras, and he argues that there’s an undue focus on social media clout. Between the industry’s “democratization,” as he calls it, and the propensity of filmmakers to seek out the actors whose faces would guarantee tickets, he admits that even he caves into the temptation of trying to swell his social media presence.

The gigs are rapidly pouring in now, with roles in upcoming films like Lonzo Nzekwe’s Orah (which premiered at AFRIFF), Adeoluwa Owu’s Adire, and Ayeny T. Steve’s Offshoot. But Udegbe maintains that he is clear about his path, drawing inspiration from the longevity of his role models. “I think there are specific audiences for every kind of actor. There is YouTube, there is Cable TV, there is cinema and there are VODs. But I always wanted to be an actor’s actor. I want my craft to be evaluated from a present-continuous perspective so that in the next ten or twenty years, I will still be in the reckoning.”

Jerry Chiemeke is a communications executive, film critic, journalist, and lawyer. His works have appeared in Berlinale Press, Die Welt, and The Africa Report, among others. Jerry lives in London, where he writes on Nollywood, African literature, and Nigerian music. He is the author of “Dreaming of Ways to Understand You” a collection of short stories.