Netflix Kaos: Rakie Ayola brings her Cardiff accent to the world

Actress Rakie Ayola has described her joy at being able to introduce Hollywood star Jeff Goldblum and a global Netflix audience to her Cardiff accent.

Growing up, it was not just her voice, but people who looked like her that she believed did not belong on television, in films and in books, because they “didn’t matter”.

Now she is starring as the Queen of the Underworld alongside Goldblum’s Zeus in Kaos, which is a darkly comedic re-imagining of Greek mythology.

It is the first time, after a career that has included roles in Black Mirror, Holby City and Silent Witness, where she has not been told to ditch her native accent.

When she first started her career, she said this would not have been allowed, adding: “It’s testimony to what’s going on TV and film-wise in Wales, right?

“That I’m allowed to do that, because for decades before they’d have me do any accent except a Cardiff accent, because nobody knows what it is.

“What is it? Where is it? What does it mean? It says a lot that people from all over the world suddenly know where that fits.”

But it was not just her voice she did not think fitted – it was people like her, whether it was on television, in films, or in the books she read.

She is one of Wales’ most successful actresses, having starred in dramas such as The Pact, and last year was given the prestigious Sian Phillips Award by Bafta Cymru, for her significant contribution to film and television.

But growing up, she rarely saw girls who looked like her on the screen, which affected how she felt about herself.

“So far as I knew, hair was meant to grow down,” she told BBC Radio Wales’ Books That Made Me.

“It was not meant to grow up and out like mine did. What kind of hair did that?”

It was the same with the books she read.

Ayola, now 56, added: “I didn’t spend my time thinking ‘why does no-one look like me?’, I just thought no-one that looks like me would ever be in a book.

“People in books, they looked like my friends from school. They were blonde, blue-eyed. They had ponytails… and it never occurred to me that someone at the centre of a story could look like me.

“Was it the books I was reading that were making me feel bad about myself? I just felt like, people that matter look like this. They have hair like that. They talk like this, they dress like that, they live like this.

“People that don’t matter, just aren’t in books.”

Ayola said there were more books with black children represented when she had her daughters – her eldest is now 27 – but she still had to search them out.

Despite this, she could still relate to the white heroines in books she read.

“I could identify with Anne of Green Gables… I recognised that Anne also felt ‘where am I meant to be?’.

“So it was a massive connection. It is easier, if you’ve seen yourself… but I wouldn’t want people to go to the other extreme and think that if you don’t physically look the same, you have nothing in common with them, because that’s dangerous too.”

She has felt at home filming Kaos, partly because she was obsessed with the stories of Greek mythology growing up, and even went through a phase of worshipping Greek gods.

“When I was 16, having gone to my local church for the six, seven years before, I overnight fell out of love with religion as I understood it, and decided that I would worship the Greek gods,” she said.

“I just remember saying, I need to worship someone, I’ll worship them instead and that was because I had a book about Greek mythology and I love Jason and the Argonauts.

“And for about a year I would say ‘I worship the Greek gods, that’s my religion’. So bonkers.”

Despite spending four weeks in Netflix’s top 10 when it was released at the end of August, the streaming service has just cancelled the second series, disappointing fans of the show.