From her very first scene in Hulu’s new miniseries Washington Black, Iola Evans is a force to be reckoned with. In the series adapted from Esi Edugyan’s book of the same name, the actress plays Tanna Goff, the daughter of a 19th-century scientist who appears to be a typical English rose. Her true identity as a biracial woman with a mother from the Solomon Islands is a monumental secret in the age of slavery—but it’s not one that Tanna wants to keep. As Tanna and her father begin their new life in Nova Scotia, and he insists that she must only be a “child of England,” she asks the simple question, “Why can’t I be more?”
The coming-of-age period drama is a tale of self-discovery and defiant joy for many of its characters, including Tanna and the titular character, a genius inventor who escaped slavery (played as an adult by Ernest Kingsley Jr.). It was the same for Evans, who has previously held roles that reflect her biracial identity, including her 2018 stage debut in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s play An Octoroon. "It was nice to play a character who just wants to be her whole full self, which is like, Why can I not be that?” Evans tells Marie Claire at a London junket and activation.
