Refugee Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) escapes to a Greek island
THE FAMILY CONNECTION
In Drift, Cynthia Erivo plays a Liberian woman who’s fled the country’s civil war, ending up scrabbling for survival under the piercing blue summer sky on a Greek island. For character background, Erivo turned to her mum, Edith, who’d been displaced as a 15-year-old girl during Nigeria’s Biafran War of the late 1960s. “I used her as my biggest resource,” she says, before joking that it can be typically hard to extract personal memories from her parents’ generation. But her mum opened up. “She would talk about the fear she felt, about how she and her siblings didn’t know if they would be able to find food or shelter at any time.” The conversations further connected Erivo to Jacqueline’s determination.