‘It’s disappointing that Kwasi Kwarteng has allowed himself to be called Kwar-zee’: actor Hugh Quarshie on the new assertiveness of young Black British people

Do decent people become real bastards when they acquire wealth?” For Hugh Quarshie, that’s the central question in the soapy new drama, Riches, in which he plays the CEO of a family-run Black haircare company. For reasons that quickly become clear, Quarshie doesn’t end up having much screen time – but his impact is felt throughout the entire show. Over six episodes, the debut season follows the Richards family as they figure out how to save their business from financial ruin.

Taking the role in Riches was not a difficult decision for Quarshie. Since his first professional credit in 1979, the 68-year-old’s career has ranged widely, from medical procedural Holby City to the title role in Othello for the RSC. Earlier this year, he was Bafta-nominated for best actor in Stephen, a miniseries about the aftermath of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. When he first spoke to Riches showrunner Abby Ajayi, he found that they immediately bonded over being Oxford graduates who “misspent” their time studying by being drawn to more creative pursuits. But when he heard more about the Inventing Anna writer’s new TV show, which has flavours of Succession and Dallas but is based on a Black British family, he was hooked.

“I think there’s something fascinating in the way that morals and behaviour changes with wealth,” Quarshie reasons. “The thing about newly acquired wealth is that one of the effects seems to be to discard all the old behaviours and attitudes. The sense of right or wrong is replaced by the sense of what you can afford and get away with.” An early scene has Stephen’s second wife, Claudia (played by Sarah Niles), aghast at the prospect of a mere £20k monthly allowance – despite coming from humble beginnings. “You want to say to someone like that: ‘You need to live longer and suffer more!’” he laughs. “I think it’s really bold of Abby to present a range of characters and attitudes that suggest that actually, people of African origin are equally capable of good and bad, and can just as easily get wrapped up in the sense of entitlement.”

As well as this, the wealth of young Black talent in the series was something that Quarshie found inspiring, and a hopeful sign of long overdue balance in the entertainment industry. “There was that kind of comic actor, a Stepin Fetchit, back in the day,” he says, referring to the 1930s vaudevillian Black actor who made a career of portraying “the laziest man in the world” – now considered a highly problematic trope. “Now actors don’t compromise [like that]; they’ll use their African names, too. In Riches, we’ve got Adeyinka Akinrinade, Ola Orebiyi, Nneka Okoye… and audiences are going to have to get used to those names and pronouncing them properly.”

“It’s disappointing that Kwasi Kwarteng has allowed himself to be called ‘Kwar-zee’”, he says, making a sudden link from his co-stars to the former chancellor of the exchequer. “In the Akan culture, the dominant culture of Ghana, the name Kwesi or Kwasi is almost always pronounced ‘Kweh-si’ – but the fact that he’s gone to Eton where people can’t be bothered to pronounce it properly…” Quarshie puts on the voice you’d imagine of an Old Etonian. “‘Oh, hello Kwar-zee!’ He didn’t correct them. I feel like there’s an assertiveness now amongst young Black British people; people will call it wokeness. It’s nothing to do with wokeness, it’s people saying: ‘No, this is who I am. Accept it.’”

Deriding the former chancellor is one of many tangents that Quarshie goes on during our 40-minute Zoom conversation. One moment, he’s talking about how a lot of Formula One drivers have been “bankrolled by Daddy”, the next, he’s posing a debate on how “a religion of the colonisers and oppressors” remains so popular in Africa, or joking about having words with Sean Bean, who pipped him to the best actor Bafta at this year’s ceremony. From his home office, Quarshie sits in front of a stacked and varied bookshelf – he wears his intelligence on his sleeve and has a real sense of curiosity about the world.

The name Stephen Lawrence has been fixed in British consciousness since 1993, when the 18-year-old Londoner was killed in a racist attack. His death became a landmark event in exposing institutional racism in the police, and discrimination in wider society. To date, Quarshie has played Neville Lawrence, Stephen’s father, twice: in the 1999 documentary drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence and in 2021’s three-part miniseries, Stephen. It’s something he calls a huge privilege and he still holds the experience close to his heart.

“I have a huge amount of respect for them both,” he says of Neville Lawrence, and Stephen’s mother, Doreen. “I had a real strong sense of responsibility to do right by them.” When it came to approaching the story more than two decades later, however, Quarshie made the decision not to speak with them again – now a father of three himself, he didn’t feel it necessary to ask for any further emotional context.

“The second time around, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to speak to Neville, because I didn’t want to reopen those wounds. What am I going to say – ‘how did you feel when you learned your son had been stabbed? How did you feel when you learned the killers had got away with it for so long?’ You don’t want to go down that road. I’ve got my own son now, who is only just older than Stephen when he was killed. You don’t have to try very hard to imagine how it would feel if your son was killed in that way.”

Another key role on Quarshie’s resumé is that of Ric Griffin on Holby City. After joining the cast in 2001, Quarshie was the longest-serving cast member at the time of his departure in 2020. Less than a year later, BBC announced that Holby City was being cancelled as part of a move to invest in other dramas around the country. Its final episode aired in March. When Quarshie heard that the show was coming to an end, he was surprised and felt mostly disappointed for his former colleagues. Still, he admits, he’d hit his own limit with the show a long time before.

“I was reaching a point where I was regularly frustrated by some of the storylines,” he explains. “I just wanted us to be, not necessarily a documentary, but to embrace the fact that there was natural drama in the health sense, that didn’t require us to, in my case, deliver my 14-year-old granddaughter’s baby while nursing my brain tumour. It was kind of at that point where I thought: is this really what I want to be doing?”

Now, without the ties of a serial drama, Quarshie is embracing the many different jobs that are offered to him – and is also considering a move behind the camera.

“My ambition is to move more into production, as a producer and a writer,” he says. “I want to tell those stories that are often overlooked, or footnotes in other people’s stories.” When pressed on what he has in mind, he’s mostly tight-lipped, but can’t help but give something of a clue. “So, I’m thinking something with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights…” Whether Emily Brontё’s tortured anti-hero was written as a Black character has been a long-debated literary mystery. Perhaps that’s an aspect of Heathcliff’s story that he hopes to tell one day? But Quarshie’s not willing to give it all away just yet. “That’s all I can say now,” he says with a smile. “More on that another time.”

‘Riches’ is available to stream on ITVX now