Whether she's a chicken-obsessed schoolboy or a hapless cop fighting a plot to bring down Notting Hill carnival, the comic actor's dizzying range means she may soon need a bigger awards shelf.
In 2020, as long-overdue conversations about race rippled out across the world, Gbemisola Ikumelo, now 39, made a decision. "I had this soul-destroying experience on a job," she says, her sunny demeanour at odds with the grim tale. She decided to post online about the microaggressions she had endured while appearing in a play some years before, making peace with the fact that it could affect her chances at future roles, and shaking as she typed out the thread. A day passed, "and I just heard my phone going ding, ding, ding. I was convinced it was going to be backlash - but it was people sending their congratulations." Ikumelo had been nominated for a Bafta for her short, Brain in Gear. "I felt like God was going: 'Don't worry.' It was a beautiful moment." She won that Bafta and has since scooped another. "When I won the first one, I was living in a small flat, and I felt like the [statuette] was judging me," she laughs. "I was like, I might have to refurb or move. Now I have an office, so they're in a very reasonable place."
You get the feeling she should keep a few shelves free. After flirting with TV roles in the US, in 2025 Ikumelo joined the writing and acting cast of NBC's Office spinoff The Paper. Closer to home, she also shot another series of the show that scooped her the second of those aforementioned awards, for best female comedy performance - the riotous buddy cop comedy Black Ops (she is still hopeful her brilliantly anxiety-inducing Brain in Gear will make it to a series).
We meet just before an early screening of Black Ops, where the first two episodes prompt a stream of gasps and giggles from the audience. Afterwards, Ikumelo says to the crowd: "It's kind of funny, isn't it?!" If her rise seems swift, it has been underpinned by years of graft on stage ("Theatre was the guy who refused to marry me ... we were living together for 20 years") and now on screen. Her breakout TV role came in comedian Dane Baptiste's Sunny D a decade ago. Ikumelo then gave her funny bones a workout by writing and starring in another BBC series, the irreverent sketch show Famalam. She remembers the first time she was recognised in the wild. "I was in a play and I was having my little sad lunch outside," she says. "Some random guy just goes: 'You finished with that?' And I went: 'Oh - did you want it?'" It took her a second to realise he wasn't asking for her leftovers, but rather riffing off the catchphrase uttered by her character Fat Sam, a chicken-obsessed schoolboy.
Black Ops - co-created with Famalam alumnus Akemnji Ndifornyen and writers Joe Tucker and Lloyd Woolf - has seen her further hone her talent for creating and embodying hapless but endearing characters. A thrilling and very silly crime caper about two inexperienced, unsuitable police community support officers forced to go undercover, much of its magic comes from the chemistry between its leads, Dom (Ikumelo) and Kay, played by Hammed Animashaun (Pls Like, The Wheel Of Time). "He's energy on legs!" says Ikumelo. "I'm a bit more introverted, and I can be a curmudgeon. So he does his best work, but he also makes me do my best work."
Series one saw the duo thrown into the treacherous underworld of the Brightmarsh gang, presided over by Tevin (Ndifornyen). This time around, they have only gone and got themselves a promotion to MI5. Once again, the series cleverly highlights the gulf between their lives as intrepid crime fighters and their very ordinary - and in the case of Dom, middle-class - existence. While shows such as Top Boy have made urban decay a sexy export, Ikumelo saw a gap in the market for something that operates with a lighter touch, and which diversifies the kinds of Black characters we see on screen. "In terms of what it is to be a Londoner, particularly a Black Londoner, I think it's important to challenge that," she says. "Dom is like, I live in De Beauvoir! I don't know anything about gangs." Not that the show forgets the hypocrisy of how race does affect who gets in trouble with the law. In season one, Ikumelo recalls: "We realise that there is a deeper world - the gang is serving a bigger, more upper-middle-class auteur." By contrast, season two sees Kay ushered towards a knife amnesty box as he returns his uniform to the police station.
The thrust of the series is a plot to bring down Notting Hill carnival, as orchestrated by a charming spy named Steve (Outlander's Ed Speleers) who, says Ikumelo, is "so charismatic and suave, you want to hang on his every word". Cathy Tyson - enjoying a welcome renaissance of late in dramas such as Blue Lights and Boiling Point - joins the cast, too, in a bit of dream casting for Ikumelo. The emotional core of the show, though, remains Dom and Kay ("they've evolved into actual friends; there's a partnership. And that gets tested in some ways," says Ikumelo, trying to avoid capital-S spoilers). Even as her star continues to rise, it is clear she has a soft spot for making excellent, homegrown comedy. "I love the real workhorse culture they have [in the US]," she says. "But I always miss the rain and the grey, and the cold damp air. With this show, I'm on home turf ... I feel like I'm at my house."