Ivanno Jeremiah on bringing old Hollywood to the West End

After its stunning debut at the Kiln in 2023, Retrograde hits the West End – lead star Ivanno Jeremiah tells London Theatre Magazine what it’s like portraying a Hollywood great.

According to Ivanno Jeremiah, he’ll be much more fun to be around in a couple of weeks time. We’re speaking on the phone, just a fortnight into the rehearsal period for the West End run of Ryan Calais Cameron’s play, Retrograde – and as an actor who enjoys soaking into his characters, Jeremiah is deep in the zone, focused on becoming Sidney Poitier.

“Because we’re so early on in the process, I’m allowing the lines to blur a little bit,” he explains. “Later on, I’ll be more responsible about going home and watching a film, or listening to a podcast. I quite like immersion, particularly with someone who has quite a distinct speech pattern and accent. So at the moment, I’m trying to keep that music in my mind, and then I’ll be casual with it by the end – I will be a much more interesting friend and partner down the line. But for now, I’m in it.”

As far as I can tell, the actor is perfectly fine company, but hearing this take on how thoughtfully he approaches the roles he plays, it’s no surprise that audiences and critics alike were completely won over by his performance the first time around.

Retrograde debuted at the Kiln Theatre in 2023, depicting the trailblazing Hollywood actor Sidney Poitier in a meeting that pitted his ambitions for success against his moral compass. As Poitier, Jeremiah’s performance was hailed as “tremendous” (Time Out), “superb” (The Telegraph) and “riveting” (London Theatre), but he’s humble, and hesitant to accept the praise on his own. “It’s a three-hander, we kind of move like a jazz trio,” Jeremiah clarifies. “It’s probably a mistake to stand out.”

The play is a fictionalisation of a real situation faced by the legendary Bahamian-American actor in the mid-1950s. Set prior to Poitier’s historic Best Actor Oscar win for Lilies of the Field (1963), and starring in the 1967 hits Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, the play shows the actor at a less glittering point in his career. In McCarthyism-era 1955, film parts are harder to come by, and with two children that he needs to support, the 28-year-old Poitier could do with some good work coming in. But when a new job is offered, it comes with a cost: Poitier must sign an oath in support of America, and publicly denounce his contemporary, friend and civil rights activist Paul Robeson.

“He’s offered everything that would sort out his problems – all of the money, all of the satisfaction,” Jeremiah notes. “But there’s a dilemma: what is he willing to trade off for that? I think that’s something that can come up for anyone across any industry. Are you willing to risk cancellation for your morals? Are you willing to risk money? Are you willing to do anything to get ahead?”

As an actor in 2025, Jeremiah can relate to having to make difficult decisions like these. “It is so familiar, even down to choosing the jobs that you do and don’t, and how it reflects on you as a person,” he says. “These decisions are the sort of things that any freelancer faces nowadays – who you align yourself with and what that work means.”

Looking at Jeremiah’s CV, he’s done a good job in saying yes to a varied set of roles. Many might recognise him from his role in the sci-fi series Humans, on which he played Max, a lifelike robot, from 2015 to 2018. Elsewhere, Jeremiah played Chris in the Sky fantasy series* A Discovery of Witches*, Inspector Barnes in the Netflix thriller Lockwood & Co., and starred opposite Sheila Atim in National Theatre’s production of Constellations in 2024. In each role, Jeremiah’s commitment shines; the audience witnesses an actor fully embodying the character – a born storyteller. But things could have gone very differently for Jeremiah if not for a bit of teenage rebellion.

“I was planning to be a lawyer, all the way until it came to enrolling in college,” Jeremiah recalls. “But I had secretly signed up for the Brit School. I’d been going for about four or five months before my mother found out – she didn’t exactly see acting as a potential life route for me. But she made me a deal: if I didn’t get into drama school after Brit on that first try, then I would go and pursue law.” Luckily, Jeremiah was admitted to RADA, and after graduating from its prestigious acting course in 2010, his career as an actor steadily began to take shape.

Now, ahead of bringing Retrograde to the West End with new castmates Stanley Townsend and Oliver Johnstone, Jeremiah is ready for the challenge – and despite it being material he’s performed before, revisiting it now feels like a fresh task.

“The play in itself has changed, in the way that new people bring new energies, and I think even I'm a different person than I was, you know, a year and a half ago,” he says. “Not only are Stanley and Oliver bringing all sorts of new life experience and choices and artistry to it, a fantastic roller coaster of a piece on its own. But it’s really refreshing to come back to it – it’s more like going forward with it.”

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Photo credit: Ivanno Jeremiah. (Photo by Yellowbelly Photo). Inset: Jeremiah with producer Colman Domingo and writer Ryan Calais Cameron, and in Retrograde. (Photos by Mark Senior and courtesy of production)

This article first appeared in the April 2025 issue of London Theatre Magazine.