Susan Wokoma is a writer-performer in high demand. The sitcom star, recognisable to many as Cynthia in Chewing Gum, has just spent a month pitching projects and taking meetings in LA. Before that, she flew to Nigeria for her first major movie role as the lead of The Ghost and the House of Truth. What’s more, the Londoner was recently named as a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit, an honour that recognises her work on stage, TV, and film. “It’s been a bit of a mad year already”, she laughs. “I’m back in the UK, and it feels so good.”

In the States, Wokoma says, she’s mostly known for Crazyhead and Chewing Gum, two E4 shows that became global hits thanks to streaming services. “The reach of Netflix is insane,” she explains. “The acquisition of Chewing Gum wasn’t in our contracts, so the international success has been really, really shocking. It’s changed everything.”

Crucially, both programmes demonstrate Wokoma’s versatility and comic timing. In Crazyhead, she plays Raquel, a foul-mouthed demon slayer who can see dead people. It’s a far cry from Cynthia, her Chewing Gum character, a repressed Christian who reads Church Weekly and warns her sister about the sins of premarital sex. Other Americans, Wokoma adds, are more familiar with Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s sitcom Crashing; it features Wokoma as an un-Cynthia figure who declares, “Everybody fucks everyone. Eventually.”

Basically, at 30, Wokoma has accomplished a lot, and she’s only just beginning. Not only is she a theatre regular – including a recent West End stint alongside Martin Freeman and Tamsin Greig in Labour of Love – but she’s an up-and-coming screenwriter. She has a pilot being produced by Tiger Aspect, a feature film in development in the US, a New York-based project with Times Warner’s incubator OneFifty, and other assignments she’s not allowed to mention.

To be fair, Wokoma started early. Whereas most of us can’t remember what we did at 14, she has it on record – with an acting credit on CBBC. At 20, she graduated from RADA and found herself balancing occasional TV gigs, like a small part on Holby City, with stage work. This included Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female productions of Julius Caesar and Henry IV in New York. One attendee was Meryl Streep.

“Oh God”, Wokoma says, recoiling at the awkward memory. “Traditionally, in the US, if a high-profile person comes to your show, they’ll come backstage and greet the cast. There was a heatwave when we did Julius Caesar, and we all went backstage and took off our clothes. Meryl Streep just walked in, and all of us were in some stage of nakedness. I had one hand covering my boobs and the other hand shaking her hand.” She laughs. “That’s how I met Meryl Streep!”

It was around this time, in 2013, that Wokoma had her own Meryl Streep moment – by which I mean appearing in her first movie, Half of a Yellow Sun. “I lost my dad when I was on that job”, Wokoma recalls of the shoot, “which was weird and horrible and those things that grief is.” The actress only had a supporting role on the Nigerian production, and was allowed to travel to Port Harcout for a few days. What happened next was so profound, it’s the subject of her aforementioned pilot script. “The producer sent me to meet my family. It was a really intoxicating mix of losing my dad but also inheriting my half-sister and my nephew and my aunts and uncles and my grandparents – who I’d never met, ever.” 

Shortly afterwards, cult comedy history was made when Michaela Coel’s one-woman play, Chewing Gum Dreams, caught the attention of Channel 4. To flesh out a TV adaption, Coel gave her own character, Tracey, a scene-stealing, ultra-religious older sister called Cynthia. “God is everywhere”, Cynthia declares. “There have been leaps and bounds in quantum physics.” Yet throughout the series, Cynthia wrestles with her sexual curiosity: she looks up the kind of websites that get blocked in Caffé Nero; she experiments down there with olive oil; and she – spoiler – loses her virginity, in calamitous fashion, before Tracey.

“Channel 4 were unsure about whether to include the sister character”, Wokoma says. “Cynthia didn’t exist in the one-woman show, and there were already so many brilliant characters.” Still, the opportunity arose. “I got a call from Michaela. Basically, we had played sisters on stage, and she said it was down to me to show them. I had one audition and I got it. Then it was really collaborative in terms of me, Michaela and Tom, the director, coming up with the character and the weird quirks.”

So how will Wokoma squeeze the third season of Chewing Gum into her busy schedule? According to online articles, the new episodes – the first to be penned by a writers’ room, not solely by Coel – will enter production later this year.

“Yeah?” she says. “I have no idea.” This isn’t reassuring. Whereas US series tend to lock down actors for years with contracts, it doesn’t quite work that way in the UK. “We shot the second series so long ago. Because there are no options on any of the actors, I’ve just carried on, business as usual.” She pauses. “I don’t think I’ll be free to film series three, which is a shame, because I’ve not heard anything about it. Literally, all the news that I get about Chewing Gum, I get from press and Twitter. So in my head, it probably isn’t happening for me. But whatever happens with it, it’ll be really exciting to see what happens.”

But surely the writers are planning something for Cynthia? “I have no idea,” Wokoma answers. “They might not, and that’s the cool thing. You could take it the way we left series two, with Tracey going off to college. That’s really exciting. It would be cool to change the structure of the thing you love and keep people guessing. But that’s not down to me.”

Recently, Wokoma’s been involved with the Time’s Up movement, specifically in the theatre branch. We’re speaking a few days after Frances McDormand ended her Oscar speech with two words: “Inclusion rider.” Does it feel like the industry is actually changing? “I know in the UK”, Wokoma says, “the Time’s Up movement is really gaining force. What people are taking for granted is the fact that there’s so many women behind this. Women have lived out discrepancies and injustices and abuse and assault. It’s being headed by the people who have been oppressed. [The movement] is not going to go away.

“But what I think’s really fantastic about Frances McDormand and the inclusion rider is that this thing was always there. It’s a very tangible, practical way of making things equal, not just in front of the camera, but in postproduction and preproduction as well. So it’s the crew as well.”

I ask if something similar is required in the UK comedy scene. It’s got to the point where TV shows don’t seem bothered by the same mediocre white male faces appearing all the time, and I can only imagine it’s worse behind the scenes.

“I don’t know if we even have a UK equivalent of an inclusion rider”, Wokoma says. “But if we do, everyone should be implementing it. The comedy world, in terms of panel shows and stand-up, is even worse. I think it’s largely about female comics not being thought of as good. So they don’t even get the initial chances that male comics get, in regards to the belief that they’re funny.

“That’s the problem. In this country, women being funny is still something that’s being distrusted. Whereas in the US, you have Julia-Louis Dreyfus, you have Lucille Ball. There’s a history of funny women having their own shows and comedy specials. Julia-Louis Dreyfus is getting Emmy after Emmy. She’s comedy royalty. We don’t have that in the UK. You go, ‘What is it? Is it about the opportunities? Do we not have the talent?’ I think, ultimately, people in the UK don’t think women are funny.” 

On a more positive note, it goes to show the importance of the BAFTA Breakthrough Brits scheme in in terms of promoting diverse voices. Now she’s returned to the UK, Wokoma’s getting ready for a series of chats with industry figures. “I’ve been so busy myself,” she says, “and that’s the point – BAFTA is getting behind us, to elevate our career. But I do have my first meeting, finally, now that I’m back. It’s with Andrew Lincoln, who I’m a huge fan of, and of Brit actors, he has the most experience working in the States. It means we can have a really boring, actor-y conversation about the actual logistics of working in the States. Also, he’s a brilliant actor who gets on with it. We don’t know much about him, and that’s exciting and how it should be.”

As for Wokoma’s upcoming projects, the one she’s allowed to discuss is The Ghost and the House of Truth, the movie she shot in January. “The story is set in Nigeria,” she explains. “It’s about a young mother called Bola, who I play, whose daughter goes missing.” Despite all the trades, like Deadline and Variety, reporting it as a “supernatural” drama, that’s not the case. “No, it’s an out-and-out thriller. It’s a character study of these two women – me and Kate Henshaw, who’s one of the biggest actresses in Nigeria – trying to find my daughter.”

Raquel in Crazyhead may share little in common with, say, Cynthia in Chewing Gum, but Wokoma’s new film sounds like a complete anomaly on her IMDb. A new career direction awaits. “Yeah!” she beams. “For me, it was the first onscreen drama I’ve done, really. I was flown over in a matter of weeks to do this huge film in which I’m pretty much in every scene. It was a real departure for me and all that comedy that I’m used to doing. It was scary but really cool.”

Applications for Breakthrough Brits are now open: apply or recommend a Breakthrough Brit at http://www.bafta.org/supporting-talent/breakthrough-brits