J’can born actress Sundra Oakley empowering local talent with Hollywood insights

After playing the role of attorney-at-law Diane Jobson in the Bob Marley: One Love movie, Sundra Oakley – a Jamaican-born actress living in the United States (US) – knew she had to return home to implement a strategy that would train aspiring actors.

That came in the form of Inside Hollywood: The Business of Being an Actor, which is a get-together event for both local and overseas actors and aspiring actors to share information and concerns about the acting industry.

“I am back home to have the second staging of an event that I created called Inside Hollywood: The Business of Being an Actor. I created this earlier this year, around late February is when I had the idea for it because, as an actor, I’ve been in the industry for 20-plus years. I realise that there has always been a deficit in our career trajectory, and that tends to be after you get that wonderful education at university like I did, or in a conservatory programme,” Oakley told The Sunday Gleaner on Wednesday during an interview at the Bob Marley Museum.

“We’ve never really been taught about the business side of the career and what [it] entails. So, because I’m a person [who] loves to educate, I love to empower, especially when I’ve seen how much we can be so disempowered or disenfranchised as actors, I wanted to do something to give back to the actors of Jamaica. Because there is so much talent, there is so much possibility,” she said.

Oakley said she wanted to bring the knowledge she has gained in the US acting industry to Jamaicans, and it is for that main reason that she started Inside Hollywood: The Business of Being an Actor.

“I’ve been very fortunate to be a working actor for as long as I’ve been, and said to myself, ‘What if I do this?’ We talk about the nitty-gritty things. We talk about the state of the industry. We talk about what’s needed to be in the industry in this era, especially with self-taping, which is the means of how we audition primarily now,” Oakley told The Sunday Gleaner.

Oakley also aims to teach about contracts and what is needed on set.

“I assembled a team of people, friends of mine, colleagues who were casting directors, writers, producers and said, would you be willing either to come to Jamaica or share your knowledge with us via Zoom, and they did. The first one was so successful, beyond my expectations,” Oakley said.

“I don’t even know if I knew what to expect. I just wanted it to go off without a hitch and to have the participants feel like they walked away with more knowledge than when they walked in the door, and it surpassed that, so much so that I was asked not to wait until next year. [And] I had planned to do it again, but to do it again before the end of the year,” she said.

SECOND STAGING

As such, Oakley returned to Jamaica quicker than originally planned with the second Inside Hollywood: The Business of Being an Actor event with other international actors in tow, such as Emmy Award winner and renowned American actor Sterling K Brown; Nia Ashi, an actress who was born and raised in London to a Jamaican mother and Guyanese father; and Quan-Dajai Henriques, the Jamaican who played a teenage Bob Marley in the Paramount movie, Bob Marley: One Love, alongside Oakley.

In the movie Bob Marley: One Love, Oakley played Bob Marley’s lawyer, Diane Jobson.

During the interview, she said the proudest moment of her career was booking the role of Jobson, a woman she sought to meet before filming and actually spent time with at her house.

“She’s a rebel, which I’ve always felt was a part of my soul. Intelligent [and] funny. Don’t mess with her. You can’t mess with that woman, and she was so important to the life of Bob, which people did not know. She handled his money. She was the one who founded Tuff Gong distribution and [the] printing pressing of the records,” Oakley told Lifestyle.

“Because, one: to be a part of the movie, the biopic of one of our most prolific persons coming out of this country. He’s passed 43 years. It had never been done. I knew I had to be a part of this movie somehow, and I told my agents, ‘Any little role you can find, even if it’s a waiter serving coffee, I have to be a part of this’,” she said.

Oakley said she knew after auditioning for the Bob Marley movie that there was no other role that she could fit in better than that of Jobson.

“I knew I couldn’t audition for Rita, obviously, and I couldn’t audition for the I Three, obviously, and it’s like I was stuck in-between worlds… As a Jamaican, that was the ultimate, to know that I would be a part [of it],” Oakley said.

One fun fact about Oakley many people do not know is that she could have been Ghost’s wife in the popular drama and television series, Power.

“It was down to me and the actress who got the wife. It was down to the two of us and… I did my research before… and I looked at the project, and I saw that the actress who plays the girlfriend, she was cast already, and I looked at her, and I said, ‘Dem naago cast mi if dem cast her already because we would [look] aesthetically too much alike,” Oakley said.

“Can you imagine if dem have di brother with two brownin? Hell wuda raise, so me know seh dem wasn’t going to do that. I looked at it, and I said it wasn’t a sense of feeling defeated. It was just like I know this industry. They’re not going to cast two people weh look similar, especially like us, [from] two love interest [in] de,” she said.

After this thought, Oakley said she still went to the final round of the audition and did her best “because you never know”.

Outside of acting, Oakley has also authored a book, is a dancer and a marshal artiste, wife and mother, and now wants to spend more time giving back to Jamaica.

“I’ve always known, but never knew how I would do it, that I wanted to be able to contribute and give back to my country. I’ve felt that from the time I was a child,” Oakley, who was born and spent time in Montego Bay, said.

“I always say I feel like being Jamaican is growing up the child of celebrities. It’s just a cool factor that you say, ‘Wow, I just got lucky’. I have always felt like that,” she said.

Oakley says coming up for her is a project with Disney Plus, a limited series called Washington Black on Hulu, based on a novel with the same name and produced by Selvin Hinds, a Guyanese who went to her first seminar. Sterling K Brown serves as one of the executive producers. Oakley plays a Jamaican in that series.

She will also be a part of a Netflix show called Lonely Planet that was filmed in Morocco, one of the countries she had been wanting to visit, and will also be a part of an audiobook with Jamaican stories.

ainsworth.morris@gleanerjm.com