Omari douglas gay
Omari Douglas: what It's A Sin debunks about AIDS and what still needs to change
Omari Douglas was never taught about HIV or AIDS at institution. It's a shocking but all-too-common reality among many who didn't live through the eighties, and it's exactly why shows such as It's A Sin - Channel 4's new hit series - are so important.
Douglas plays the vibrantly brave nature Roscoe in the five-part drama, which depicts the lives of a community of gay men and their friends between and As the decade unfolds, they are forced to reconcile with the AIDS epidemic, a new deadly disease that has made its way over from the US to the UK.
“With my sex education at school, I don’t remember hearing the word 'AIDS',” Douglas tells me over Zoom on a snowy Friday. “If HIV was mentioned, it was very vague. It’s the lasting effect of stigmas; if you have a generation of teachers or workers that still hold that stigma, then it’s not spoken about. It’s just ignored, passing down this concept that we own to sweep certain things under the carpet.”
Douglas adds that LGBTQ+ learning should not be lim
TBB TALKS TO… OMARI DOUGLAS STAR OF NEW Queer DRAMA ‘RUSH’
Omari Douglas’ calendar has been full of bookings since he graduated from Arts Educational Schools, London in
From carrying out in Clarke Peters’ iconic musical, Five Guys Named Moe, to starring as Nora in Emma Rice’s Wise Children at The Old Vic, we spoke to him monitoring the recent release of Willi Richards’ Rush via BBC iPlayer’s Culture in Quarantine series.
Rush, which follows a male lover love triangle between Male, Lad and Boy, is one of several novel LGBTQ+ works added to Culture in Quarantine as a result of lockdown restrictions causing the cancellation of Pride events.
Hi Omari, since you graduated from drama school in , you’ve worked on a number of projects – particularly musicals. Growing up, were you always enthralled by the world of musical theatre?
Absolutely! I’ve had a strong connection with music for as drawn-out as I can recall and I think that was probably the catalyst for my journey into theatre. It was cute amazing to discover all these shows where melody is the driving power. I took part i
Omari Douglas on It&#;s A Sin, the s era drama about AIDS and the euphoric delight of queer love
I was shocked to learn that this was your first screen role and to have so many scenes with the iconic Stephen Fry. What that was like for you?
It was so fun! Before we started shooting we went for a cup of tea, and we chatted a lot. He wanted to find out about me and was really interested in my response to being in the show and learning about everything because it was everything that he lived through. And he was telling me some really harrowing stories. When he rewrote Me and My Girl, which obviously was a huge success in London, and then went to Broadway. He was telling me about how he went to proceed and visit the show on Broadway and so many guys in the ensemble of that show had passed away by the time that he&#;d gone back. It’s weird for me because I come from a musical theater background. So it&#;s weird thinking about just how much of a dramatic impact the virus had on a community where all my groundwork. So that really brought it home.
But when we got into filming, I kept thinkin
Life is a cabaret for It’s a Sin’s Omari Douglas
How gratifying was it for you that It’s a Sin had that positive, real-world impact?
It was just overwhelming. We never expected the show to own that kind of response. It’s one thing for an audience to involve with the characters and to fall in devote with them. But when it reaches out [like that]… The fact that those HIV testing figures just soared, that’s a response that stepped into another realm. It hit a broader societal [moment] – it felt like a bit of a movement.
There was also the educational element of the show. A lot of viewers had no idea what the onslaught of HIV/AIDS was like, or what the social and political response was.
It’s particularly brilliant because there’s a whole generation of people who didn’t even know that this part of our history existed. When I think about being a kid at university, if I had seen anything remotely to do with gay or queer society on television, there’s no way that I would own spoken to anyone about it in the pla