‘It felt quite healing’: Gotham award-winner Wunmi Mosaku was 7 months postpartum when filming ‘Sinners’

Did you know, actress Wunmi Mosaku was 7 month postpartum when she stepped into her award-winning role as Annie in “Sinners”?

Last night, actress Wunmi Mosaku won the award for Outstanding Supporting Performance at the 2025 Gotham Film Awards for her powerful portrayal of Annie in Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster “Sinners.” Stepping into the role of Annie, a full-figured, dark-skinned hoodoo practitioner, Mosaku’s character was not only central to the film’s plot but also added to the layered messaging within Coogler’s storytelling. 

“I describe it as magical,” Mosaku told Elle, reflecting on her first time reading the vampire-horror film’s script. “The allegories, the message, the meanings—so powerful. I threw the script down and screamed in my living room.” 

Instantly falling in love with the story, the actress recalled Coogler telling her that he wrote the role of Annie “with [her] in mind.” 

“He told me on my last day of filming that he had seen the trailer for [the HBO crime drama] ‘We Own This City,’ and he said there was a scene where he was like, ‘Oh, there’s my Annie,’” she recounted in an interview with Brande Victorian. 

By the time they started filming the project, Wosaku was seven months postpartum. Marking her first major project since giving birth to her daughter, the actress explained how her experience on the set of “Sinners” and her character made the transition back to work easier. 

“It’s hard to say it’s worth the time away from her, but I didn’t regret the time away,” she explained. “I never was like, ‘Why the fuck am I here? I should be with my baby.’ I felt like I was being nourished so I could go home and nourish her.”

“Being a mom is an integral part of Annie, and it’s an integral part of me, now,” Mosaku previously told W Magazine. “I was like, ‘I can learn from her as a mother.’ Her connection to her daughter, who is now an ancestor, is something I felt really connected to as a mother.” 

In addition to fueling her journey as a mother, Wosaku admits that playing Annie healed a part of her self-love journey. The film, which grossed more than $360 million at the box office, received praise for not only its unique storytelling but also for the representation on screen. Throughout the film, viewers watched Annie be Michael B. Jordan’s love interest, a nurturer, and a fighter. 

“Seeing dark-skinned women, full-figured women, feel so loved and seen by the film felt very embracing. To see that kind of woman just fully loved and appreciated, the wisdom appreciated, the nurturing appreciated, the sexiness appreciated, the darkness, the naturalness, everything appreciated,” Mosaku explained.

Ultimately, she credits Coogler and his reverence for women and his ancestors: “Really, if it wasn’t for Ryan, if it wasn’t for his mom and the aunts and the people who look like me in his family who raised him to love us as we are, I may not have been picked for this role,” she told Elle. “He really loves and honors the women who raised him, his ancestors, and his future ancestors. He’s very much aware of what has been gifted to him, you know, spiritually. The way he reveres women, he doesn’t belittle our contribution in his life and in the world. I feel like he’s a conduit.”

“It felt really healing to hear people say, ‘I’m so glad,’ ‘I’m so happy,’ ‘I needed to see this, feel this, know that this is how we can be loved, should be loved, are loved,’ and not the stereotypes that we see continuously online or onscreen of whoever wants to paint us however they want to paint us,” she noted. “I didn’t realize how lonely it felt until I felt like, ‘Oh, we are all feeling this love together.’ ”