I immigrated with my single mum and siblings to the U.K. when I was 11, I didn’t speak English and found that the only class I could communicate in at school was drama and bizarrely, English. The teacher would ask us to read Shakespeare out loud and no one wanted to but I would always put my hand up, because no one ever laughed at me, years later I realised verse was as foreign to their ears as English was to mine, so we weren’t so different after all.
Not able to afford drama and not knowing about scholarships or even the process of applying I went to do a BTEC National in performing arts at Croydon college, then got a job as a TV presenter a couple of years, saved enough money to attend a drama school, the only one I could afford was The London centre of theatre studies for 18 months.