At a 2022 Quramo Festival of Words panel about Nigeria’s emigration wave and its impact on the arts and industry space, I muttered (apparently out loud) about the need for honesty and nuance, which is very often ignored, especially in heated moments. The woman beside me agreed. She introduced herself as a nurse and an actor — an intersection that lingered with me. Later, I asked her to watch my bag for a moment. That was my first meeting with Onyinye Odokoro.
Odokoro’s story would turn out to be one shaped by the currents of migration in ways big and small. She carries a nursing degree, a golden ticket out of Nigeria at a time when Canada and the UK are courting nurses in droves. And very early in her career, she found herself in Rome, cast in a Sky Original production, a set of circumstances that her father immediately recognised as her chance to leave. Onyinye did think about it. But she came back, and in conversation, she often returns to the refrain, “I’m pro-Nigeria. I want to travel the world, but I always want to come back.”
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Few people know that she was part of Unwanted, a Sky Original filmed in Italy in 2021. She had done a handful of short films and the Africa Magic series Dilemma when the casting director found her through two shorts she’d made with Stephanie Linus. Suddenly, she was on a plane to Rome, and her working life was transformed. “Unwanted wasn’t the usual,” she says. “They were flying me business class, sorting out my visa, accommodation, everything. It was such a privilege. I knew this wasn’t how every international production worked, but I also knew it was something rare.”
On set, despite being early in her career, she was startled by the contrast. In Nollywood, telenovelas move at breakneck speed. “We’re filming how many scenes in one day? About two takes and you’re done. There’s a deadline, because a month later the series has to air,” she says. But in Rome, she might spend the day on a single scene, across months of shooting. “Your nervous system just relaxes. You can sit with your character and contemplate: Do I want her to chew gum? Do I want her to talk in a certain way? Preparation becomes possible.”
It also meant enjoying a certain level of structure very early in her career. “Once it’s 7 p.m., the AD is responsible for shutting down the set. It doesn’t matter if I’m about to jump off a balcony. They don’t tell me — they tell the crew. If it’s seven, it’s seven. If it’s past, agents are informed, overtime is billed, and the actors are protected,” she says. “That’s what a union does. It means no one is overworked. Not even the director. I thought, ‘so this is what structure feels like’.”
Playing an immigrant on the project also came with its own challenges. She recalls one scene where she was meant to look dazed, “like I was trying to connect with myself,” and suddenly started to bawl. “I thought at the moment that while we were there acting the scene, actual people were dying in the sea while trying to flee whatever hardship they had in their home countries. Realising that provided the overwhelming emotion that I was able to pull from to deliver that scene.”
Her father, hearing of the opportunity, urged her not to come back. “He said, ‘Onyinye, make sure you find a way to remain there.’ I told him, Daddy, look at my visa. They gave me seven months. How do you want me to stay?” She laughs, remembering. “He didn’t know, he just said, ‘Find a way.’” For her, the decision to return was shaped by conviction. “Except if Nigeria becomes uninhabitable, like in a war, I want to live here. I was there and I kept wishing I could carry their transport system back to Lagos, carry the food and the restaurants, but still I wanted to go home.” She continues to nurture the connections she made, messaging the casting director periodically, keeping in touch with the director and producer. But her choice is clear: she wants to travel for work, yes, but to return.
That attachment to Nigeria is rooted in her childhood in Nnofia, Anambra State. She was the third of four children in a household she describes as lively and expressive. “My father, especially, can be theatrical in the way he explains things. I wonder if maybe I got this gift from him. No one in my family is in the arts. Maybe they had it in them, but they never got to explore it because their generation was different.” She remembers the sense of community and adventure: children outside rolling tyres, swimming in muddy water, and inventing games. Plays at secondary school social nights gave her a first taste of performance, but she didn’t think of it as a special ability, saying “I didn’t think it was something I wanted to make a career of. I thought everybody could act”.
Her faith would keep her going regardless, even as she discovered how nerve-wracking standing before a camera can be during her first experience on set. “I wore my shirt and buttoned it up, and I told the director I was done,” she remembers, laughing. “His reaction was hilarious — he told me I had to keep going until he said cut. It was an exciting experience, but I realised that with the camera, there is no hiding. It’s different from stage acting, because it sees all of you.”
Although her educational background is far from the arts, she ascribes the development of her acting techniques to reading. “When I started acting, I needed an affordable avenue to learn and books were the closest answer,” she says. “While I would never discount the role having formal training plays in forming an actor’s technique, I believe that when it comes to acting, the greatest teacher is life.”
Whoever follows her on her socials will see regular updates of her current reads. More recently, as an extension of her love for books, she decided to start a book club. “I have always wanted to host people, and more than reading, I love discussing the books I’ve read. Hosting a book club is one of the things that gives me joy.”
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The first time Onyinye truly understood what it meant to “japa” was when her sister left. “She has always been anti-Nigeria. She wanted to leave and never come back,” she recounts. “That was the first time I experienced someone close to me going abroad and not returning. Before then, it was just internal migration, moving from one neighbourhood to another. But that was different.”
She has often thought about the place of migration in Nollywood (an epiphany we had ourselves about 3 drafts into the original piece we started in April). Many industries in Nigeria have been hollowed out by departures, most especially medicine and tech during the Buhari and Tinubu years. Onyinye herself, with her nursing degree, holds one of those coveted passports out. But in Nollywood, she argues, the pattern has been different. And she keeps thinking about why.
The reasons are practical. At this point, it is worth noting that some Nigerian actors have left to seek more structured and larger stages, convinced that only outside Nigeria can their craft be fully wielded and more often for other personal reasons. O.C. Ukeje (Locke & Key), Joseph Benjamin (Greenleaf), Wale Ojo (Foundation), Somkele Iyamah (Star Trek: Discovery), and most recently, Ashionye Raccah (Wednesday) and others have attempted the leap away from Nollywood’s dysfunction of high workload and amnesia. It has rarely translated into the kind of consistent career that migration promises doctors or engineers. International (co-)productions are still sparse. Until this year (with Brazil), Nigeria did not even have a co-production treaty with another country. And to access and audition for major roles, one often has to physically be abroad. While some of the above-mentioned didn’t desire a full leap, some other Nollywood stars moved abroad into entirely new professional fields.
“But I’m hugely optimistic,” Onyinye insists. “Having had that taste [with Unwanted], I know it’s possible. God wanted me to taste it so that when more comes, I will believe. When I see Shamz Garba cast in Children of Blood and Bone (Hollywood’s adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s fantasy novel that shot in South Africa earlier this year and slated for a 2027 release), it revives my hope. It tells me it can happen for us. Nollywood can get that big, like the Koreans, like the Mexicans, when their TV shows were everywhere. We deserve it, because we are brilliant.”
Her friendship with Garba has reinforced this belief. “We were talking about his [Children of Blood and Bone] experience, and it reminded me of Rome. He said, imagine what we can do if we have more time and resources. And it’s true. Look at how much we do with so little here. Imagine if we had more.”
While nursing and Unwanted were her tickets out of Nollywood’s dysfunction, as I put it to her, Onyinye insists she was never planning to leave permanently. “I’ve always been pro-Nigeria. I will travel for work, for holidays, but I want to live here. Unless there’s a war. Otherwise, this is home,” she reiterates.
Staying has meant building a career that straddles both mainstream platforms and festivals. Dika Ofoma’s timely A Japa Tale gave her the role of Emuche, a woman torn between love and her partner’s decision to leave Nigeria (a connecting migration thread that excited us further as we chased this interview), and an irony that is certainly not lost on her.
“Dika had seen Dilemma, when he contacted me concerning A Japa Tale. When he shared the story, I was sold instantly. I also relate to him as a young filmmaker who came into the industry in 2020, and he is already making solid waves.”
It is important to note that beyond their working relationship, Onyinye and Ofoma are good friends alongside Uzoamaka Power (fka Aniunoh). In fact, Ofoma, who started out as an active film journalist, had once interviewed Onyinye. “I am critical of the industry as I am of Nigeria because I love them both and know we can be better,” she said to him in 2022.
She reunited with Ofoma on God’s Wife, a short film that is more traditional in setting, language, and plot. With sparse dialogue, the film capitalises instead on the visual elements and mood to amplify the theme and drive the story. Premiering at the S16 Film Festival in 2024, it has toured Rotterdam and New York African Film Festival to a universal reception.
With its subtle commentary, the short film tells a story through the eyes of Nkiruka, a young widow subjected to baneful traditional practices deemed a normal rite of passage for widows, which clash with her Catholic beliefs. “It’s an important and timely film. People need to be sensitised about the harm these practices cause women, their children, and society.”
On the set, she discovered herself functioning as a producer. “I came on board to help with logistics, to save costs. Dika said, ‘You know you’re already producing,’ and I realised, yes, I was.” Following the “collaborative” effort, Onyinye hopes to explore more producing roles after her God’s Wife experience.
Similarly, another role would require her to improvise for an emotional reaction in Chioma Paul-Dike’s Dreams. The short film premiered at AFRIFF 2023, where she plays Nelo, a married, heavily pregnant woman haunted by an unknown presence in her home. Acting in a horror film came with its own custom set of challenges, especially with the technicalities of reacting to something non-existent. But asking the salient question ‘why?’ set Onyinye on the path to unravelling the character. The film is being expanded into a feature, Oblation, currently in post-production. Within Nollywood, not many contemporary horror films exist outside of religiously anchored stories, and it will be intriguing to see how a feature-length portrayal of fear lands with audiences once released.
Her Netflix role in EbonyLife’s Baby Farm stretched her to new limits, calling it her most challenging role. The role required much physical and emotional weight from Onyinye, causing her to show up in a way she’s never done before as an actor. Her character, Adanna, undergoes considerable suffering throughout the limited series exploring the themes of caste, privilege and the lengths humans will go in the pursuit of their desire. “But it also reminded me of what is possible in Nollywood. We pulled so much off in just five weeks. It showed me our relentlessness.”
Just before a wider audience got to see her in the Netflix series, she played Zara in Showmax’s Princess on a Hill. She ascribes her highlight of the experience to the level of professionalism on the set, which she notes as striking because the cast and crew were in serious tandem, considering how much they had to cover in production. “And it mattered because the story wasn’t shot in order. I had to track Zara’s journey carefully, not let the later, bossier Zara slip into the early episodes,” she reveals.
In Princess on a Hill, she plays an ambitious and naive young lady who has big dreams but faces situations that test her true values in a vicious corporate world. The viewer quickly invests in Zara from the first episode and grows with the character as she evolves from her naive ambition to ruthless compromise.
She speaks fondly of Phoenix Fury, directed by Ifeoma Nkiruka Chukwuogo, which won Best Film at AFRIFF 2024 and scored multiple nominations at AMVCA 2025. The story follows a woman and her revenge mission on Yali, a man central who wronged her. Onyinye plays Nnenna, who she describes as a lover and a fighter who goes the extra mile to protect her friends and speak up for those she cares about. She recalls the filming process as intense, but also admits to being proud of her role, where she found performing and speaking in Igbo very seamless.
“Phoenix Fury was a different set altogether, and I don’t always have many sets where we rehearse before we start filming. Ifeoma is ready to run it 10, even 20 times, until you get it right, and even though that can be exhausting, it’s a good kind of exhaustion. Having it recognised at AFRIFF was a no-brainer.”
She also recalls filming Stephanie Dadet’s Everything in Between, an intense two-hander (alongside Valentine Ohu) in the vein of Sam Levinson’s 2021 marriage-on-the-rocks film Malcolm and Marie. Yet to be released, a private screening has been held so far, and the ensuing conversation was a postmortem where the audience took sides in their analysis.
She recalls being cast for the film about two weeks before principal photography and meeting up with Ohu to rehearse after discovering that the film was a dialogue all through between both of them. “About a whole 90 to 100 pages of dialogue, ending between two people. We also had such a short time to work with it, so it meant rehearsing and helping each other get our lines.”
Despite more recognition and higher pay, the economy undercuts sustainability. “I earn more now, but I struggle more. Two or three years ago, what I earned could sustain me longer,” she says, still filled with gratitude. “Now I find myself thinking of business strategies, content creation, fashion, just to stay afloat. Some days I feel disconnected from my craft, because survival takes up my mind.”
Onyinye is carving her path in the industry across commercial and auteur-driven projects, and her care for the characters she plays is obvious. One might even say that Onyinye does choose her characters, it’s the other way around. Acting for her has become a kind of purpose tied to her faith.
“I don’t actually have that much liberty to choose the roles I play. By divine orchestration, these roles have come to me; it’s not exactly a thing of me having so many roles to pick from, and I then choose,” she says. “ But, this doesn’t mean I’m not intentional about the roles I pick. I want to tell stories of all kinds. I believe all stories are saying something; there’s a message in every story, whether the story is aware of it or not.”
Migration reshapes her personal life as much as her professional one. We are all familiar with the pop-culturalized Sola Sobowale meme in her King of Boys character, “Welcome to a new dispensation,” that frequently takes over Obasanjo’s internet during every migration wave. “In the last two years, I’ve lost close friends who left. Some wanted to stay but couldn’t. It hurt deeply,” she admits. “And with romance, it’s worse. Before, first dates were about hobbies. Now one of the first questions is, ‘Are you japa-ing in two months?’ If the answer is yes, what’s the point? It’s sad.”
Still, she insists she remains open. “I love people. I like to make meaningful connections. If one friend leaves, I’m open to new ones. Technology keeps us talking, even if it’s not the same.” She hosts a book club, still gathers friends to watch films, and works out regularly. “Community means a lot to me, so I won’t close myself off.”
Looking forward on the career front, she wants to take her versatility to another level. She believes her strength as an actor is in emotionally heavy roles. An upcoming project she’s anticipating is one where she is a teacher who has to mentor a prodigy student. She sees the role as a new and interesting character for her talent and career. Not much is known yet about the details of this project but it’s clear that her roles are carefully picked to reflect her range.
As a lighter aside, she shares that the longest trip she has taken within Nigeria to shoot a film was to Ibadan, a city she says she would happily live in if only the transport system allowed her to reach Lagos in the time it takes to cross Lekki.
There are a hundred reasons why many Nigerians want to remain in Nigeria. At the same time, there are a hundred and one reasons to want to leave. Asked what simple things tie her to Nigeria, she reveals, after brief thoughts. “The weather. I’m a sunshine girl. I went to Italy last November, and I hated all the layers. I can’t do the UK. I need sunshine. I love rain, but not gloom. And the sounds — keke, the roadside shoemaker hitting his hammer, the cock crowing. The Nigerianness of Nigeria. Those things keep me grounded.”Yet, beyond the weather and bits of Nigerianness is a sense of calling. “Nollywood is home,” she says, reminding me of the famed 2021 Netflix campaign during our conversation. She continues, “It’s where I can express the fullness of the gifts God has given me. I want to go global, yes, but not just for ambition. I want to carry the Nigerian flag with me. When you see me in Black Panther or The Woman King, I want you to say, she’s a Nigerian actor. No matter how high I fly, I want to come back home, to help build. Nollywood is my industry. I want to champion us, reflect us, showcase us. That’s my purpose.”
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