Demi Isaac Oviawe: 'My grandmother cradled me like I was a newborn baby'
Demi Isaac Oviawe stars in Holding on Virgin One. Picture: Brian McEvoy
Demi Isaac Oviawe might have been born in Nigeria, but she’s as Cork as they come. Not afraid to tell it as it is, the Young Offenders star has the personality of a kettle about to boil over – she can’t get the words out quick enough.
But underneath her bubbly personality, the 21-year-old has had to carry a lot on young shoulders. The actress, who has lived in Mallow for 18 years, lost her mother to breast cancer when she was just five years old. At 15, her father passed away after a cancer diagnosis.
“The last time my dad saw me act, I was really young. He used to travel back to Nigeria at Christmas,” she explains, hence missing her performances in Mallow No 1 National School's nativities.
"In my head today, my dad's on holiday. He's in Nigeria with my grandmother. That's how I cope with it. I know where his grave is. I saw him being buried, but to me, he's in Nigeria. That's just my way of dealing with it.”
The actress, who received praise for wearing a traditional Nigerian grown for her character Linda's debs in the Young Offenders, returned to the African country in 2019. It was the first time she had visited her ancestral homeland since her move to Ireland as a toddler.
“It was a massive culture shock,” she says, “I wouldn’t last ten minutes out there on my own.”
During the trip, she was reunited with her Nigerian grandmother. "It was the first time she'd seen me since I was since I was born. And she held me, cradled me, like I was a newborn baby.”
It was very emotional, Oviawe says, especially with her grandmother’s likeness to her father. “She is the spitting image of him. I was heartbroken when Covid happened because I promised her I’d come back,” she says, a promise she is yet to fulfill, in large part, due to the pandemic.
She’s also been busy trying to propel herself on after the success of The Young Offenders. Some roles have been forthcoming, such as a lead-performance in short film, To All My Darlings, and her role as eavesdropper Aoife in the television adaption of Graham Norton’s bestseller Holding, directed by Kathy Burke.
"My character Aoife works alongside Pauline McLynn, so basically we became best mates,” she says with some enthusiasm. “She knitted me a hat and all!
“She's just absolutely gas,” she goes on. “The best way to describe it is, you know, when your teacher tells you to sit in the front, and then they put the hyperkid next to you? That's what it was like [working with Pauline].”
But, overall, it hasn’t felt like roles are being written for her, she confesses. To the extent that at one stage, she started writing her own script.
"It was basically about an African girl, an Asian girl and a Traveller girl, and about the trials and tribulations the three of them go through.”
Asked whether we can expect it on our television anytime soon, she admits she’s scrapped it. “I am very good at coming up with great creative content, like a sketch or a TikTok, but I can't use words beautifully,” she says.
The exercise was more born out of the frustration of feeling there weren’t enough scripts out there that represented the Ireland we live in today – an Ireland where many communities are made up of much more than “the blue-eyed blonde haired” girl, she says.
“It’s difficult for people like me. I am not going to get another big break like The Young Offenders. I recently got a role in Netflix [The School for Good and Evil, due in October], but I only got it because they were looking for an albino character and couldn’t get them... so they opened up the pool.”
Isaac recalls Virgin Media’s recent season launch – which was also attended by Love Island’s Dami Hope and influencer Katja Mia.
“Myself, Dami and Katja were like.. ‘there's three of us [black people]?' We shouldn't be celebrating the fact there is three of us, but it's because there's usually only ever one.
“I hope someone writes something for me,” she says. But, at the same time, she admits if someone were to commission her show about the three best friends who just so-happen to be from minority backgrounds, she probably wouldn’t take the job.
“I’d want to give someone else the chance, to get the opportunity I got. Without The Young Offenders, I wouldn’t have gotten my golden ticket. I would have gone to college and become a teacher. That would have been it."
- Holding begins on Virgin Media One on Monday, September 12
