PE
I would really love to know my parents as an adult. I lost my dad when I was 14 and my mum when I was 20.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 18 November 2023 source ↗
The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 203 →
Paterson Joseph
British actor and author
I wouldn’t live so long in France. After eight years, I came back to London.
George Michael
English singer-songwriter
I should have sung with David Gilmour at Carnegie Hall because I'm a massive fan of Pink Floyd.
Yusuf Islam
British musician
The respelling of my name to Joseph.
All the times I was mean to someone.
More from Paapa Essiedu
View profile →After losing my mum still managing to finish drama school, because that was really difficult. I lost her in the first year.
Called me the N-word.
To find as many moments to laugh as possible.
In order to raise money to pay for myself to go to the National Youth Theatre, I performed a medley of my drama school speeches and some songs for my entire school. Considering I can’t sing, this was terrible. I did U Remind Me by Usher and Hey There Delilah by the Plain White T’s. They paid £2 each – basically, to laugh at me.
I was a happy kid. I had quite a small life: I grew up in Walthamstow and didn’t really leave east London. I didn’t go to the South Bank for the first time until I was 18 years old.
In 2016, the moment my agent rang me to tell me I’d got the part of Hamlet for the RSC. While I was on the phone, I looked to my left and turned to the right, and a bus whizzed by and the wing mirror was so close to me that it knocked my hat off.
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