Entertainment
Bafta TV Awards 2021: Astounded Rakie Ayola unable to look at prize after achieving 43-year dream
Rakie Ayola is so shocked by her Bafta win that she can’t bring herself to look at her award, something she’s dreamed of achieving for 43 years.
The television star, 53, took home the best supporting actress prize for her role as Gee Walker in the BBC’s Anthony at the Bafta TV Awards in London on Sunday night.
The film tells the story of Anthony Walker who was killed in a racist attack in Liverpool in 2005, with Rakie playing his parent in what life would have been like for Anthony rolling backwards to the time he died.
And on Monday she said she can’t stare too long at her Bafta gold statue as winning seems so surreal.
She told Metro.co.uk: ‘As each hour goes on it feels a bit more strange because, I don’t know if you have any ambitions or any dreams, the kind of thing you might only say out loud to someone you really love because you think that’s ridiculous.
‘Well, one of mine was just fulfilled yesterday. So, it’s kind of weird to keep looking at it, thinking, “I’ve been dreaming about you for about 43 years and here you are.”
‘I find myself scuttling past it because I find myself thinking, “I can’t look at you right now because I can’t quite believe it.”’
Rakie insists she won’t be keeping her award in an unusual place like some stars, saying it will take pride of place in her home.
She continued: ‘It’s going to be on display. There’ll be no door stoppage thing going on in this house.
‘We’ve got a dresser in the kitchen so I think it might go on a shelf there at the top, although my husband thinks it should go in the living room, but then I think it would appear in the background of every Zoom I ever did.
‘I can promise you, it won’t be on the floor as a door stop and it won’t be in the bathroom.’
During her speech at the Virgin Media British Academy Television Awards, Rakie said working on Anthony was a career highlight.
Expanding on her words the day after the bash, she told Metro.co.uk: ‘There were several reasons – purely being able to tell that story, being trusted to play Gee Walker, [writer] Jimmy McGovern’s beautiful, poetic, unusual script, and Jimmy McGovern himself.
‘I finally plucked up the courage one day on set to tell him I just assumed I’d never work with him, that I just wouldn’t ever be required to be in a Jimmy McGovern piece and I was beyond excited that that had happened.
‘So there were all those things, and all those things come together to tell the story of a life that is tragic but Jimmy, he does that best, he tells real life stories so well.’
She concluded: ‘With Anthony it felt like everybody was at the top of their game and it was all coming together, and we were going to be able to present Gee with something that she will have been glad to have been involved with and we were not going to let her down.’
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