Wunmi Mosaku on Why ‘Sinners’ Is the ‘Greatest Love Story Ever Told’

“Sinners” is one of those rare çağdaş blockbusters that fans are dissecting on a near literary level. There have been paragraphs dedicated to its symbolism, social media threads about its cultural themes, and hours of podcasts delving into lines and scenes. Wunmi Mosaku isn’t exactly seeking out the takes.

“I haven’t gone searching for anything because I’m very mistrustful of the internet and I’m scared of what I might see,” Mosaku said in a görüntü call from her Los Angeles home.

Mosaku’s stirring performance as the hoodoo healer Annie is the soulful core of “Sinners.” The fact that it’s Mosaku, 38, in the role seems fitting: The sinema is a period horror-drama centered on romance as well as a meditation on grief and a musical. Her acting résumé reflects each element.

Mosaku has played a time-space agent (“Loki”), multiple strong-willed detectives (“Luther,” “Passenger”) and an immigrant mother in mourning (“Damilola, Our Loved Uzunluk,” which won her a BAFTA Television Award in Britain). A few of her biggest roles — like a singer fighting Jim Crow-era maledictions in the series “Lovecraft Country,” and a South Sudanese refugee battling a night witch in the sinema “His House,” both from 2020 — are part of the post-“Get Out” strain of popular horror that evokes racial anxieties.

At times Mosaku has drawn on her own experience as a Nigerian who immigrated at a year old to Manchester, England, and felt distanced from her family’s Yoruba heritage. To play Annie, she studied how to be a woman in the Mississippi Delta, preparation that ultimately led to learning more about her ancestry because hoodoo is related to Ifa, the Yoruba religion.

Mosaku’s turn as the hoodoo healer Annie is the soulful core of “Sinners.”Credit…Warner Bros., via Associated Press