BIFA Breakthrough Performance Nominees on Their ‘Absolutely Mad’ Year

Since bursting on the scene in 1998 as a scruffier and scrappier distant cousin to the BAFTAs, the British Independent Film Awards (BIFAs) have been an early bellwether for future talent in front of and behind the camera. Giving a very early shout out to some of the biggest stars working today is the BIFAs breakthrough performance award (formerly the most promising newcomer award).

Jamie Bell and Ben Whishaw were recipients more than 20 years ago, while other winners have included Dev Patel, Naomi Ackie and Jessie Buckley. As for Emily Blunt, John Boyega, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mia Goth, Andrea Riseborough, Will Poulter, George MacKay, Jodie Whittaker and Cosmo Jarvis, they’re among a formidable lineup of names who only managed a nomination.

So it’s only natural that this year’s crop of nominees are perhaps a little excited about what lies ahead. Speaking to Variety ahead of the awards ceremony on Dec. 8, Nykiya Adams (“Bird”), Susan Chardy (“On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”), Ruaridh Mollica (“Sebastian”), Saura Lightfoot-Leon (“Horde”) and Jason Patel (“Unicorns”) discuss almost giving up, first-time festival visits, upcoming projects and the year in which everything kicked off.

Nykiya Adams

When casting director Lucy Pardee came to Nykiya Adams’ London school to find a suitable youngster to play the key part of Bailey in Andrea Arnold’s drama “Bird” — and star alongside Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski and Jasmine Jobson — she was at first directed towards Adams’ older sister. “She was always the actor,” she says. She was also too old, so the attention then turned to Nykiya (now 14 years old, but 12 at the time). 

“Bird,” her debut acting role, would take Adams to Cannes this year, where the film was in the main competition. The red carpet experience she describes as “pinch me… I thought, it’s not real, I’m in a dream.” When the film started, her first time watching herself on the big screen, Adams covered her eyes. “But I got used to it in the end.”

While Cannes was great (especially the food), returning to school afterwards to tell her friends about it was what Adams was really looking forward to. “My best friend is really proud of me, but she’s staying really humble and not telling everyone about it, but my other friends are like, ‘You’re in a film!’”

Adams is now hoping to juggle both acting and sports, another major passion, once she’s done with school, with Jobson’s agent already now looking out for more parts. And if she could wish for any future role, it’d be directed by Rapman and starring alongside Ashley Walters.

Susan Chardy

Susan Chardy admits acting has come to her later in life — and after having built up a successful career as a model and entrepreneur — but it’s a passion that’s always been there since a child. She had tried previously to get a foot in the door, even landing an audition with Steve McQueen some 10 years ago for an HBO series that was never to be. “He wanted to see me and I was that close to getting the role,” says Chardy, who was born in Zambia and raised in the U.K.. “But it was important to me because we all have imposter syndrome and I remember saying to myself, if Steve McQueen sees something in you, you absolutely need to listen to his voice and not the others voices around.”

A decade on, and the dream has finally come a reality, and in almost the perfect manner. Chardy plays the lead in “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,” the long-awaited sophomore feature from Zambian/Welsh filmmaker Rungano Nyoni, set and shot in Zambia. And it bowed Cannes, where it became one of the best reviewed and most talked about features at the festival. 

“Honestly, if anyone had said, you’re going to be in a Zambian film, in your mother tongue, and it’s going to Cannes… I don’t even think it would have been on my radar of dreams,” she says. Chardy took the whole family to the south of France, including her ex-tennis pro husband and her four-year-old son.

The main still from the film — taken from the film’s opening scene and on show in Cannes — sees Chardy in car wearing a sparkling sci-fi headpiece, which bemused her son.

“He thought mummy was a superhero. So I told him, well, mummy is a superhero, just a different kind.” A blown-up black-and-white and framed print of the still now hangs from one of Chardy’s walls at home.

Ruaridh Mollica

Ruaridh Mollica admits he had no idea just how big a deal Sundance was going to be for him and “Sebastian,” marking his first lead role in a film (and, he says, “technically” his first film). “But it was absolutely mad. We arrived and then all of a sudden people recognize you, because they’ve been going through the brochures and suddenly you feel like you’re in this bubble of creatives.”

From this bubble, “Sebastian” — a queer drama in which he plays a writer moonlighting as a sex worker — would emerge from the festival as one of the buzziest titles, and Mollica an actor to watch. But it almost didn’t happen, Mollica having decided to jack in his drama dreams — and endless audition tapes — to focus on degree in computer science. He was drawn back in by a lead role in a Scottish short film (the successful audition offer arrived the day after he’d chosen to quit), which was followed by a BBC drama called “Red Rose.” With acting back in his sights, Mollica turned down an offer to study at UCL — “a bad boy move,” he jokes — to give it a proper push, paving the way for “Sebastian.”

The bad boy move is not one he’s currently regretting. After Sundance, the sudden interest in him was enough for Mollica’s agent to send up off to LA to do the circuit, meeting casting directors, producers, production companies, studios and managers. He eventually signed with Range. 

“It does definitely make you think about higher powers or fate, or those kinds of things,” Mollica says of his near-miss with a wholly different career path. “In those moments, when you’re about to give up, and something just says, ‘Nah, keep going.’”

Mollica recently appeared in Armanda Iannucci and Sam Mendes’ superhero satire series “The Franchise,” while upcoming roles include Stephen Graham’s Apple TV+ series “A Thousand Blows” and a Channel 4 series called “Summer Water.” On the film side, he’s starring in “Sukkwan Island” alongside Swann Arlaud, Woody Norman and Alma Pöystri, shot in the Arctic Circle.

Saura Lightfoot-Leon

Unlike the other BIFA breakthrough performance nominees, Saura Lightfoot-Leon shot her breakthrough performance — in Luna Carmoon’s striking debut feature “Hoard” — a good three years ago. The film, in which the Dutch-born English-Spanish actress plays a young woman revisiting repressed memories from a childhood trauma, would then premiere at the 2023 Venice Film Festival.

“Hoard” turned heads for its first-time filmmaker and Lightfoot-Leon’s first film role, but the actress is still able to celebrate it more than a year on. “It’s wonderful, it’s like a never-ending, giving project,” she says. It was also project that was perhaps more unorthodox than most, especially for a debut. “Luna decided that she’d love me to improvise almost all of it, and I was up for it,” says Lightfoot-Leon. It was a tricky task, especially when it came to table reads, so the two eventually found a “halfway house, which was keeping some of those moments hidden from me so that we could capture the real spontaneity in the moment,” she says. “But it was wonderful, and a real leap of faith. Luna put a lot of trust in me and let me take risks — what a gift!”

Since “Hoard,” in which she starred alongside Joseph Quinn (post-“Stranger Things,” but pre-“Gladiator 2”) Lightfoot-Leon’s career had made several further leaps, with several other big names added to the list. She’s among the leads in Netflix’s upcoming Western series “American Primeval” from director Peter Berg and writer Mark L. Smith together with Taylor Kitsch and Jai Courtney, while she can currently be seen in Paramount+ espionage series “The Agency,” playing a rookie spy and sharing scenes with Michael Fassbender (and with Joe Wright among the directors). “The Agency” has already been commissioned for a second season.

“I feel like I’ve been jumping centuries and generations of women,” she says of her two major TV gigs. “And I’m really grateful, because I’ve I’ve got to expand my vocabulary as an actor in every way possible — every project teaches you different things.”

Jason Patel

Jason Patel almost didn’t make the crucial chemistry test that led to his career-changing role in “Unicorns,” an LGBT love story in which he plays a drag queen living two lives. Starring as Mowgli in a stage performances of “The Jungle Book” at time, his early morning train to London was canceled and then rerouted, leading what he describes as an “absolute debacle” in which he went into the room with co-directors Sally El Hossaini and James Krishna Lloyd and fellow lead Ben Hardy “on basically one-hour’s sleep.”

Thankfully, it all worked out — and Patel says there was a “crazy connection” with the team. “It was just really organic and natural — you can’t fake any of that stuff when energies collide and match. We were just meant to work together.”

Prior to “Unicorns,” Patel — who trained as an actor — was perhaps best known for his music, his R&B and Bollywood-inspired 2022 single “One Last Dance” getting plays on BBC Music and the Asian Network. But he says he was always hustling and trying to get as much acting experience as he could. Much of this came through stage work on regional theater (Patel had been playing Mowgli for a large part of the year and a half before his big film break).

“When it came to the point of being cast in ‘Unicorns’ it felt like I was so ready, because I’d already been working these crazy amount of hours,” he says.

The hard work appears to have paid off, with Patel saying “Unicorns” has opened many doors. “There’s some really cool stuff coming up,” he says. Among these is the upcoming BBC crime drama “Virdee.”

“I’m auditioning and meeting people, and working at the level that I really, really wanted to work at for a long time, and working with people that I’m passionate about or with writing that I’m passionate about,” he says. “So I feel really fortunate.”