Dream Date
Brushes with our celebrity crushes.
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Karaoke with a stranger is ordinarily a daunting prospect, but actor Archie Madekwe is fearless behind a microphone. On a scorching hot afternoon in July, Madekwe — all six feet and five inches of him — settles into the plush seats that wrap around the walls of a private room in Moyagi, a high-end 1920s Japan-inspired karaoke haven just off Regent Street in London. He grabs a yuzu margarita and allows me to choose an icebreaker: “Mr. Brightside” by the Killers. Any trepidation around singing in front of someone new dissipates the moment we turn to each other to belt those opening lines. “I’m coming out of my cage, and I’ve been doing just fine!” he gleefully chants.
The South London–born actor is a self-proclaimed “karaoke king”; he’s even dabbled in hitokara (singing solo) in Japan. Nearly two years ago, Madekwe’s years of karaoke nights proved useful in a scene that was eagerly dissected by his fans online. When they weren’t fixating on Rosamund Pike’s one-liners or Barry Keoghan lapping up Jacob Elordi’s bodily fluids in a bathtub, social media users were eagle-eyed on a moment in Saltburn during which, in the warm glow of a fireplace, Madekwe steps up to a karaoke machine and delivers a beautiful but woefully short rendition of “Rent” by the Pet Shop Boys. Post-Saltburn, he has not only been inundated with requests to record a full cover but invitations via Instagram DM from seemingly every karaoke joint in London hoping for a visit. Moyagi is the one that has reigned victorious — and accommodated Madekwe and his crew of actor friends on many occasions.
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In a recent favorite session here, the likes of Elordi, Alison Oliver, Cailee Spaeny, Daryl McCormack, Kaia Gerber, and Amelia Dimoldenberg were in attendance. Or maybe not? “I think I’m mixing nights now,” he backtracks, taking a beat to piece together the memory. “I think it was the first proper time I’d been here, and we were like, ‘What the fuck have we walked into?’ We really went for it; we got so smashed. Wig hair was found four weeks later.” In these cozy, subterranean rooms, where the only source of light is emanating from TV screens, the nights tend to blur. “I think all of the Saltburn cast has been with me at various points,” he tells me, laughing.
If Emerald Fennell’s dark class satire put Madekwe, 30, on the radar of his hometown’s karaoke scene, the actor’s vocal range will truly be put to the test this month in Lurker, which sees him transform into a narcissistic, peachy-haired pop star in Los Angeles. Directed by Beef and The Bear writer Alex Russell, the film is a delicious skewering of fame’s gravitational power. Madekwe’s Oliver becomes the object of obsession for an overzealous fan named Matthew, who wiggles his way into the star’s inner circle of sycophants. Lurker is anchored by an alluring turn from Madekwe, who plays a character simultaneously charming, erratic, and dangerous in ways that justify why everyone seems to fall at his feet. In this tantalizingly complex thriller, the relationship between artist and stan is at once parasitic and mutually invigorating. The very thing — the very person — who’s bad for you is also fuel for creativity.
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Madekwe likens that connection to the necessary evil of social media. “There’s an addictive quality to it, but we keep it because it’s validating,” he says, leaning forward. “There’s a push and a pull to it. The need for attention, the need for validation, the need for praise — we all have that inside us to some degree.”
He felt that pull when he filmed his concert scenes early last year, which were shot at actual gigs hosted by co-star Zack Fox and attended by unsuspecting fans, who were roped into playing impromptu extras. “People are looking at you and screaming your name,” he says, recalling the surreal sensation. “People talk about having that adrenaline rush and then going to the quiet of their hotel room and craving the addiction of that. I definitely understood it. When you’re a musician onstage, you are leaning into the seduction of being that presence onstage.”
Madekwe feels much more comfortable on our intimate stage. And if there are any remaining nerves, he obliterates them when he sings “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” from Mulan with theatrical, Disney-prince-worthy conviction. One drink down and he’s sprinkling runs into “Everything” by Michael Bublé before line-dancing to “Achy Breaky Heart.” “I would say, as a karaoke performer, I am a crowd-pleaser,” he says. “My classic is Sean Paul’s ‘Get Busy.’” (Video evidence proves this to be true.)
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Lurker has its own showstopper, too. At a high-concept music-video shoot where Oliver is pelted with paintballs, he sings about the ideas rooted at the film’s core: “What’s the difference between love and obsession?” he croons. (“It was one of the most scary things I’ve ever done, and it was a real exercise in trust,” Madekwe says of being shot at close range.) Madekwe’s old high-school friend Rex Orange County wrote the song, which was supposed to feature on the musician’s last album before he offered it to the film.
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So what is the difference between love and obsession, according to an actor who knows where the line is drawn? “You know that Maya Angelou poem?” Madekwe wonders aloud. “She talks about how ‘love liberates.’ Love is actually about freedom. Obsession, I think, is about possession and wanting them to be in your orbit, whereas love is maybe wanting those things, but also allowing choice and freedom and seeing someone enough to be like, ‘I love you enough to want the best for you.’”
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Embodying a character whose celebrity status defines him made Madekwe reevaluate his own relationship with fame. “There’s not many times where you don’t think about the way that it affects you,” he tells me. He notices those almost imperceptible shifts in his friends — how they have to strategically sit away from wandering eyes at restaurants and avoid walking down certain streets. “No one tells you you’re going to be on your own in hotels all the time and then you’re going to do a film and people are going to come over to you because they saw you on TikTok.”
It’s an especially salient thought for Madekwe because, he tells me, he couldn’t have predicted he might be famous one day. He attended the BRIT School, the celebrated performing-arts institution with alumni who include Tom Holland, Amy Winehouse, and Adele, but he was never pressured to focus on his career. (“I’m on the Board of Trustees, which feels so adult,” he says, sounding surprised.) Students there aren’t allowed to audition for professional projects until after their graduation showcase. The school had its own hypercreative corners, though. “You’re finding a random little hole in the ceiling,” Madekwe says of the freedom he had. “You’re like, ‘Is that a lost place? Can we put on a play in there?’ And they’re, like, filling in the health and safety work. You’re getting a ladder and doing a play up there.”
Drama school was a different experience altogether. On the Origins With Cush Jumbo podcast last year, Madekwe spoke about a particularly troubling meeting in his third year at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, when a tweet he posted about the treatment of people of color at drama schools caught negative attention from the principal. Had he not experienced the freedom and validation of the BRIT School, he’s sure he wouldn’t have had the same level of confidence in himself to push back. “The anchor, for me, was that experience of knowing that there was something different,” he says.
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At LAMDA, he faced teachers who told him he’d never star in period dramas or do theater. (His roles in the BBC’s 2019 adaptation of Les Misérables and his West End debut in The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? suggest otherwise.) But he doesn’t let himself get distracted by criticism. “I’m doing things that feel exciting and inspiring to me, and proving people wrong is par for the course,” Madekwe says, matter-of-fact. He can even take ownership over his work now: Lurker brought Madekwe his first producer credit, and he’s developing a number of projects, including one with his Midsommar director, Ari Aster. “It’s a shame that it was born out of necessity,” he says of carving out a place for himself in the industry, “but actually, it’s amazing because it’s something that I love.”
We’re about a dozen songs deep, and Madekwe has grown maybe a little too ambitious. He queues up “She Will Be Loved” by Maroon 5 and doesn’t realize until the chorus that Adam Levine’s vocal range surpasses his. “I actually can’t … ” he says, rushing to the machine to cut the song short. “I set myself up!”
Even the karaoke king needs vocal rest at some point, and after one last impassioned rendition of “Baby Got Back” and a valiant attempt at K-pop (“It’s going straight on the Spotify,” Madekwe says, in praise of NewJeans), our session reaches its natural conclusion. We’re out of breath, our voices are gone, and the actor heads out into the blistering London sun to catch a friend’s play. It doesn’t surprise me when, a week later, I lurk on Madekwe’s Instagram and find him back in his element: on vacation in Marseille, belting “Toxic” at a hole-in-the-wall karaoke spot where he rubbed shoulders with regulars in a tiny room clouded by cigarette smoke. When a microphone appears, no matter where he is in the world, he really can’t help himself: “It’s just in my blood at this point.”
Production Credits
- Photography by Charlie Gates
- Styling by Harry Lambert
- Photo Assistant Jed Barnes
- Styling Assistant Ella Bacon
- Grooming Nadia Altinbas
- The Cut, Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples
- The Cut, Photo Director Noelle Lacombe
- The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor Brooke Marine
- The Cut, Photo Editor Mara Rothman
- The Cut, Fashion Market Editor Emma Oleck
