AKTA INTERVIEWS: How to Make It to the West End. Stranger Things’ Miranda Mufema Talks Us Through Her Journey

Writer: Takunda Muzondiwa

I The Hunger We Do Not Confess To

We do not speak of it aloud. The wanting. The impatience. It sits behind the ribs like something half-hatched, warm and fidgeting, refusing us rest. We walk through the West End the way thirsty people pass fountains—pretending we’re just out for air while our insides press up against our skin, craning for a taste. The pavements glitter with last night's rain and every theatre door looks like a portal when we stare long enough. Sometimes we catch our reflection in the brass of a box-office window, our bodies leaning forward as if pulled by a string. We laugh it off. We keep walking. But the hunger stalks us in the spaces between footsteps. And we come back again and again. Like moths rehearsing the route to the flame.

Every actor knows this place. Not geographically, but cellularly. That mix of longing, foolish faith, and something close to grief. Because wanting that big break feels like grieving a version of yourself who has still yet to be chosen.

And then, every once in a while, someone breaks through—someone lands the thing we’re all dreaming of. This year, that someone was Miranda Mufema.

II The Shape of a Big Break 

Since its West End premiere Stranger Things: The First Shadow has collected several awards including two Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment and Best Set Design. Its spectacle is undeniable. Its stagecraft borderline alchemic and at the centre of the storm sat an actor whose stillness and precision anchored the impossible. Miranda Mufema has just concluded a year-long run in the leading role of Patty Newby in this brilliant production.

“It is such a great play and it keeps you on your toes. It’s been such a whirlwind being part of it” she tells me.

Before Hawkins cracked open and swallowed her whole, there was the audition. Miranda had been pouring herself into acting for years. She had been preparing for a role she did not yet know would exist. “I think all the work I was doing before… it just lined up,” she says. “Like everything I had been learning suddenly had somewhere to go.”

When she first read for Patty, she didn’t try to impress anyone. She didn’t calculate the audition into strategies or theories. “I just tried to be truthful,” she tells me. “I didn’t want to push. I just… did the thing.” And in that understatement lies the quiet discipline of her craft. The thing is never just a thing. It is years of muscle memory, of instinct grown from repetition, of understanding how to hold a character lightly enough that she can breathe through you.

And then came the moment. The phone call. The hinge on which her life turned.

III The Room Where It Happens

Like a child with her face pressed against a window, tapping at the glass and begging to be let in, I join my video call with Miranda brimming with questions. Tell me about the audition. Tell me about the moment. Tell me if you knew you had won the audition?

“I was in Estonia,” she begins. “I was directing a short film at a film school there. Literally in the middle of a briefing. I looked down and saw twenty missed calls from my agent.” That was the first sign. The second: an email sitting in her inbox like a flare in the dark that read, Congratulations, you got it. “I excused myself, went to the bathroom and just… screamed,” she says. “I let my whole body feel it.”

But what becomes clear as she speaks is that the scream was not luck. It was the release of years of discipline. “I really wanted it,” she says, “but I also knew I’d done the work. All the rounds, all the prep, all the thinking. You can’t control whether they choose you, but you can control whether you’re ready when they do.” The actors who break through aren’t the ones who scramble last-minute; they’re the ones whose readiness is already alive in their muscles, already threaded through their routines.

“People think the big moment happens in the room. But it happens way before that—in your training, in your curiosity, in how much you practice when no one is watching. Being consistent is what gives you confidence.”

She talks about working on scenes even when she had no audition in sight. Watching theatre obsessively to stay connected to the craft. “When you’re in those long gaps with no work, you have to resist going numb,” she says. “Stay engaged. Read. Take Class. Make something, even if it’s tiny. Your opportunity will come, but it won’t wait for you to get your act together. You need to already be ready.”  Be the actor who is already in shape for the job long before the job appears.

Miranda didn’t just book Stranger Things by chance. She met the moment with a readiness she had built piece by piece. And when the call came, she didn’t hesitate. She screamed—because she knew she’d earned it.

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IV Staying Upright in the Upside Down

There is a very particular hunger that rises in the chest when you sit across from an actor who has lived the thing everyone else is chasing. “This role changed my life in a great way,” she reflects. “I could finally be like, cool— I’m an actor. That's one thing it really solidified for me.”

But Miranda refuses the fantasy that booking a major will suddenly rearrange your sense of safety in the industry. “People keep asking, ‘What’s next?’ And I’m like… I can’t really tell you.” She is truthful about the industry’s instability. “Some of my castmates went straight into rehearsals for something else, some said, ‘I’m taking a break until January.” There isn’t a right or wrong way.” What matters, she says, is not clinging to the idea that your value increases or decreases based on your momentum. “I don’t think it’s fair on yourself to only define your worth with jobs you’ve gotten or the jobs you’re auditioning for.” Actors are sold the myth that getting the big break is the cure. Miranda dismantles that gently. What the big break  really gives you, she says, is perspective. “Part of acting is literally just being a person.” That means rest. Saving your money. Using the quiet seasons to train, recalibrate, reconnect, and rebuild the muscle that actually sustains you: your craft, not your credits.

And that craft, she insists, begins long before anyone knows your West End debut. Her preparation didn’t start with Stranger Things; it started years earlier, for example when she put herself through NYT Rep auditions which helped her understand what professional group auditions felt like. “That gave me a really good insight into the structure,” she explains. So when the audition for Stranger Things  arrived, she wasn’t overwhelmed—she was ready. That is the knowledge aspiring actors rarely hear: that the audition that “doesn’t work out” is still working for you. That every rep you build is cumulative. That the job of being an actor is not the moment your life changes. It's the thousands of quiet hours that make you able to hold the moment when it finally arrives.

“That’s my lived experience right now,” she says, clear and steady. And suddenly, you understand: the miracle wasn’t the call. The miracle is that she was already someone capable of receiving it.

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