Wunmi Mosaku wins best supporting actress at 2026 BAFTAS and champions independent designers

There is a particular kind of composure required of actors during awards season: learning to hold a conversation while your glam team dolls you up, chatting through schedules with publicists and talking to journalists intermittently. When I speak to Wunmi Mosaku, ahead of the 2026 BAFTAs, she is doing all three – as well as attempting to secure tickets to the play All My Sons currently on at the Wyndham Theatre. “Well, it’s a revelation to me that I can’t do an interview smoothly whilst having hair and make-up done,” she laughs down the phone from her hotel room.

It is day five of what the 39-year-old describes as a “14-day week”. This evening, Mosaku has won the award Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Annie – Hoodoo priestess and wife of Smoke (Michael B Jordan) – in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a film that has, in the 10 months since its release, become an instant classic. Part musical, vampire thriller, romance epic and period drama, Sinners stretches time as well as genre against a backdrop of the blues in a Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta. According to Mosaku, “It’s about capitalism and it’s about the cost of freedom,” she says. “Do you stay in your truth… or do you go where the money is, where the power is?” Each viewing, she believes, reveals something new. Audiences agree: the film has been both a box-office smash and a critical darling, inspiring multiple cinema trips (she has met people who have seen the film more than 20 times).

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Tonight, however, is not only about film. It is also about fashion – and, for Mosaku, that meant upon independent, sustainable London designer Priya Ahluwalia to do the honours. For the big night, the actor wears an astonishing floor-length electric blue Ahluwalia gown, with bright blue eye shadow to match. The Mancunian has long championed Black designers, and Ahluwalia – whose work draws on her Nigerian and Indian heritage – immediately felt like a natural fit. “I really like representing my two cultures. I like wearing Black designers as much as possible,” Mosaku, who is Nigerian and British, says.

Wunmi Mosaku wins best supporting actress at 2026 BAFTAS for her role in Sinners

Currently pregnant with her second child, Mosaku’s red carpet dressing system means colour is key and comfort is non-negotiable. “It’s actually really difficult to get cute flat shoes,” she observes, though her stylist, Shameelah Hicks always pulls through. “We go for comfort but we don’t want to look like we are wearing maternity clothes,” Hicks says. “It’s fashion that happens to be pregnancy-friendly,” Mosaku concurs.

In fact, frustration with the lack of actually stylish maternity wear has prompted Mosaku to design her own line, Iyadé – which translates to “mother has arrived” in Yoruba – to close the gap. The collection, which she has been developing for over a year and hopes to launch soon, centres on fashion-forward pregnancy-friendly pieces; Mosaku was even wearing the samples last year before she became pregnant again. “I want to spotlight mothers and make them feel beautiful, seen and represented,” she says.

Original article appeared on British Vogue