Fehinti Balogun: ‘When you speak of truth, it catches on’

The ‘I May Destroy You’ star has dedicated his recent years to the climate fight, with his new digital theatre show ‘Can I Live?’ discussing his experience as a Black environmental activist. He talks to Isobel Lewis about giving up meat, his time with Extinction Rebellion and finding truth in hip hop

‘The climate crisis is gonna take all of us. It’s gonna take risk and truth and heartbreak and support and community' (Ali Wright)

What was the culture that first exposed you to the climate crisis? A David Attenborough documentary? The Day After Tomorrow? An Inconvenient Truth? For Fehinti Balogun, it was James Cameron’s Avatar. “I thought, ‘Oh God, that’s sad isn’t it? Cutting down all these trees,’” he recalls. The actor and musician, best known for his roles in I May Destroy You and Informer, would go on to become a climate activist, working initially for Extinction Rebellion (more on them later) and then independently giving lectures across the country. His latest project, Can I Live?, is a visual-album-cum-theatre-show with theatre company Complicité, using spoken word and rap to share his impassioned anger about the oncoming climate crisis. With the recent UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report warning that humanity is at a “code red” level when it comes to the destruction of the earth, it couldn’t be more needed.

Originally intended as a live theatre show before the pandemic hit, Can I Live? is enthralling and innovative. In it, Balogun talks about living with his mum during the pandemic and struggling with her lack of acceptance of his activism. He describes her rolling her eyes and telling a cashier that “he’s trying to save the planet” when he refuses to take a plastic bag. From there unfurls a mix of sketches, songs and animated segments, during which he discusses the realities of the oncoming crisis, people’s inability to face it and his experience as a Black climate activist. It has the feel of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” video, using exciting and witty visuals and music to explain uncomfortable facts.

“I feel like I’ve always connected to truth in music, especially in hip hop,” Balogun tells me. “I think that’s why I connect with Kendrick Lamar so much. Whenever you’re hearing him, like, Untitled Unmastered, To Pimp A Butterfly… that’s him talking about his experience. When you speak of truth it catches on, and with the climate crisis, you just want to tell the truth and what better way to do that than through hip hop?”

Balogun wasn’t always this passionate about climate change. It was while he was working on Myth, a play about the climate crisis, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2017 that something switched and he researched the extent of the problem. He read This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. The result, he says, was “climate despair”. “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that kind of existential dread in my entire life,” he says. “When you’re first activated in any sort of political way, it’s almost like seven stages of grief. [There’s] intense anger, not just at the situation, but at everyone else. I couldn’t understand why, if everybody knows this, why are we just going to work, going to the shops? I couldn’t compute.”

Balogun gave up buying plastic and eating meat overnight, the latter of which he’s not done since (plastic would naturally turn out to be a bigger challenge). It felt, he says, like it was “enough”. But then the summer of 2019 came – one of the hottest in history – and the anxiety returned, overshadowing the career milestones he should have been celebrating. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is the point where I’m supposed to be my happiest… and I’m just not,’” he says. So he attended his first meeting for the then-relatively unknown activist group Extinction Rebellion (XR), where he found himself surrounded for the first time by “people who were just as freaked out as I was and weren’t putting it away to get on, but were actually holding hands with despair”.

Synonymous now with shutting down London, Extinction Rebellion is an activist group whose members are stereotyped as white, hemp-wearing hippies. Its activists regularly get, and often aim to be, arrested at protests. Where did that leave Balogun, as a “young Black male on the streets” already disproportionately likely to be targeted by the police? It was a question raised by his mum, who reacted with horror to the news that he was working with XR between jobs. “She was like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re sacrificing your career to do this… there is no reason to sacrifice all these things to be amongst these people that seem to have nothing better to do,’” he says. It’s a topic explored in Can I Live?, which acknowledges the “privilege” of protest – financial, class-based and racial.

Because, Balogun says, his mum had a point. Using her argument, he created a climate lecture that he took into Black and working-class communities. During his time with XR, he says, he felt that his “purpose” was to be the person to “bridge the gap between those that didn’t experience the same experiences that I came from and those that do”. Unfortunately, getting audiences that didn’t consist of climate activists to watch was a struggle. At the same time, his friend, the actor and rapper Jamael Westman, was playing the lead in the West End production of Hamilton. Balogun says he admired the ways in which Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical was able to educate and tell its own story – about history and racism in the US – in a way that was “completely accessible”.

As a work that mixes an important message with stunning visuals, the digital nature of Can I Live? (and its Pay What You Decide price tag) will allow Balogun to reach out in a way that theatre, with its old buildings and “echo chamber”, can’t always. It is, however, a tricky endeavour. “I can’t expect to change the world from this one show, but I really hope that there are people watching this that never saw themselves being involved with this issue… and suddenly a door has opened for them,” he says. “The climate crisis is gonna take all of us. It’s gonna take risk and truth and heartbreak and support and community.”

He does hope the show will be performed live one day and relished the opportunity to return to the stage in May, starring opposite Gemma Arterton in Walden at the Harold Pinter Theatre. Once again, Balogun ended up playing a climate activist, described as a “consistent pleasure to watch” by The Independent’s Ava Wong Davies. The experience, after so much time away from the stage, was exhilarating.

“I’ve always loved the live audience… and to be able to share the communal heartbeat, the pauses, the moments where you sense you’re just about to get the laugh or get the dramatic drop,” he says. “The ‘ooh’s – I love the ‘ooh’s! When someone ‘ooh’s, you know you’ve really done it right. We’d not at that point seen that many people in a year and to be able to do it definitely felt like a sharing, as opposed to a performance.”

Balogun in ‘Can I Live?' (David Hewitt)

That communal experience was one he had again while working on one of his most recent and notable projects, I May Destroy You. Michaela Coel’s series, like Can I Live?, used art to make bold, often uncomfortable statements, this time about the lives of Black people and sexual assault survivors. To say it was a hit fails to do it justice – it changed the lives of its viewers, earning two Baftas and nine Emmy nominations. Did Balogun, who played a partner of Kwame (Paapa Essiedu), have any idea reading the script that he’d stumbled across something quite so once-in-a-generation? “I knew it was good,” he says, delivering the understatement of the year. “I didn’t know it was gonna do what it’s doing now. [But] I knew it was special.”

Describing the filming process as “the nicest, most welcoming, collaborative set I ever stepped foot on”, Balogun says that I May Destroy You showed that truth didn’t need to be “pretty” or “palatable” to be accepted. “It told the truth to someone’s experience, and it showed us the multifaceted individualism of being Black, of Blackness… It was honest, it was representative, it was whole at a time when we just needed that. We just needed truth.” He must hope that Can I Live? will do something similar? He laughs. “It feels so crass to go, ‘Oh, yeah, I hope it’s as good as I May Destroy You.’ But yeah, I hope it does do what Michaela did… I hope people watch it and they go, ‘OK, yeah. I’m ready. Let’s go.’”

‘Can I Live?’ tours UK theatres virtually until 28 November. For more information, visit complicite.org.