From Eastenders To York Nina Wadia Talks About Her Pantomime Role

Growing up in India and Hong Kong, EastEnders and Goodness Gracious Me star Nina Wadia didn’t have the chance to see that peculiarly British form of Christmas theatre called pantomime. No wonder she was taken aback when she auditioned for what became her first job after drama school – a pantomime version of Robin Hood at Theatre Royal Stratford East.

“I had trained in classical theatre and pantomime had ‘mime’ in the name so I thought pantomime was some sort of mime. It was a shock being brand new out of drama school and going into an audition thinking mime was involved. They asked if I could sing and dance and I thought ‘what kind of mime is that?’,” she recalls.

Despite that initial confusion, Nina was cast in the pantomime – as Friar Tuck. She continued working at that theatre for the next seven years so no wonder Theatre Royal Stratford East holds a special place in her heart for giving her a chance.

“If you think of pantomime in those days I don’t think you’d go to a brown actor. I loved that it was such an open theatre that looked at actors regardless of their colour and if you had potential helped you develop it,” she says.

“The only other place that happened to me was radio. I was in the radio drama company and played everything from white Australian to black South African. On radio you can be anything - it’s all down to your voice and your craft.”

This Christmas for the first time in more than 30 years Nina is back in pantomime playing Fairy Sugarsnap in Jack and the Beanstalk at York Theatre Royal. As for her costume she told her husband that “they’ve dressed me as an aubergine pretending to be an artichoke”.

But for the American writers strike she would have been filming as the Fate Mother in the Netflix series based on Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. Instead she’s voicing a Channel 5 Milkshake animated series Tweedy and Fluff and a video game whose title she’s not allowed to reveal. The varied work is typical of a career that has seen her defy typecasting to play everything from a neurosurgeon in Holby City to Lockdown Mutha in a social media series she made during covid.

Of course it was the BBC2 Asian comedy sketch series Goodness Gracious Me 25 years ago that made her name. She didn’t realise just how ground-breaking the series would be. “I’ve said this many times but I just thought if we can make brown people laugh at our jokes we’ll have done so well. The truth is that it took off in such a spectacular way that I was in a state of shock at how huge it was.

“It completely changed what I thought was going to happen because I thought I was going to be a theatre girl for the rest of my life and I had a career on radio and was very happy with that. After being on radio, Goodness Gracious Me was picked up for television which I’d never down before. It was an entirely strange media to me – one of those live Friday night shows with multi-cameras. But I did that thing of sitting with the sound man, sitting with the cameraman and just learning. What you see on screen is me learning how to act on screen.”

Then there were seven years in BBC1’s EastEnders, playing Zainab Masoon. Nina has said she found it difficult finding work immediately after she left the soap but has no regrets about being in EastEnders. Soap is a two-edged sword – it brings success (and she won several soap awards along the way) but also means an actor is trapped playing one character. That’s why she left the series.

“I was missing creating characters,” she says. “For me half the fun of being an actor is creating different people. I need to be doing that and realised very young that I’d much rather be a character actor than a lead actor, although some character actors also lead. Zainab was the closet I’ve got to a lead character.

“I’d never regret being in EastEnders, never in a million years, because it raised my profile with a different demographic and brought me very different roles as well. So you can’t complain.”

She’s also turned producer, setting up a production company with her husband, composer Raiomond Mirza. They’ve produced two films so far, Four and Strangeways Here We Come, which made it into Netflix’s Top Ten.

When she’s not acting Nina is a tireless supporter of a variety of charities, which led to her being awarded the OBE. This stems from her background as a Zoroastrian. She says that Freddie Mercury is the only other famous Zoroastrian she knows of. “Their ethos is about being a good human being. From a very young age my parents said always be kind, always be giving. They ensured that when I started being successful I picked some charities to support,” she says.

When her mother died from a kidney condition, she started working for kidney research. After her father’s death she felt an orphan and worked for Bernardo’s. When her son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, she began working for charities supporting that condition and child healthcare.

“My charity work has always focussed around things that have affected our family that I can hopefully change for other people so they don’t hurt as much,” she says.