‘I’m very happy to be busy’: O-T Fagbenle on his trio of Emmy-eligible performances
O-T Fagbenle has been gracing American film and television screens since the early aughts with I Could Never Be Your Woman, Dirt, and My Boys (to name a few), but he is busier than ever.
Last year, he was in the Apple TV+ series Loot and Presumed Innocent (which he tells Gold Derby he actually filmed at the same time), Netflix's No Good Deed, the independent film Killing of a Nation, and a short he also wrote and produced, which he is now pitching as a longer form project. Meanwhile, this year he wrapped up a six-season run as Luke on Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, all while filming a role in the independent film Splitsville on "spare weekends" off from The Handmaid's Tale.
That's a lot to say goodbye to all at once, but in true artist fashion, he doesn't look at it that way.
"I'm very happy to be busy. When people ask me, 'Is it hard being an actor?' I'm like, 'No, it's hard not acting.' That's what's hard. Acting is not the hard part," Fagbenle tells Gold Derby.
Still, the roles in the three 2025 Emmy-eligible series (The Handmaid's Tale, No Good Deed, and Presumed Innocent) all come with complications, one of which is adopting different American accents for each of them.
"I did a show recently and I had someone say to me, 'Oh, you should do another interesting voice, like you did for Presumed Innocent.' Maybe if I was serving myself, but I try as much as I can just to be of service to the piece and not be interrelational," explains Fagbenle, who has previously revealed that Ghostbusters character Walter Peck was a partial inspiration behind Nico's voice on Presumed Innocent. "In Presumed Innocent, someone makes a comment in one of the scenes about how his voice is grating or how he's annoying. I just went, 'Oh, OK, great, let me just go and find out that.'
"For No Good Deed, it mentions a couple of times that he was brought up in New York, and I knew who had been cast as his mom, and I knew who he had married. And so, when I did his history, 'OK, well, he probably went to a historically Black university, so he probably has a Black-sounding, African-American sounding, East Coast-related accent, but it might have been softened because he has to fit into certain white spaces. And so, then I go, 'What is that?' And then I find people who I think sound like that; it's what the clues tell me."
As Luke Bankole on The Handmaid's Tale, the complexity for Fagbenle came more from where the story took him in the final season.
"It seemed to me that his big block was taking action in a physical, practical, putting-your-life-on-the-line sense. He was always a bit more of a bureaucratic, go-to-the-embassy type of dude. And so, I was really excited to see him take matters into his own hands and take all the big risks," Fagbenle says, referring to Luke's involvement in Mayday, which leads to an uprising in Gilead when his wife June (Elisabeth Moss), among other handmaids and Aunts, are going to be hanged. "I thought the writers were really brave to give Luke that step forward."
Luke also proves himself to be very useful once Gilead falls within Boston; he is an integral part in getting the electricity turned back on, for example. But for all the victories Luke experiences in the final run of episodes, Fagbenle shares that he personally never wanted to play it as excitement. Instead, "I was more driven that there is this next step, which can get us one step closer to [saving Hannah]. But there is no satisfaction, as it were," he explains.
In part this is because there is so much more work to do and so many more steps to go before there's even a chance at getting his daughter back in his and June's lives.
"The threat of the worst case scenario, which is something bad happening to Hannah, it is there and there's a ticking clock to it. That being said, there is more hope than he's maybe ever had — more tangible, realizable hope. And also a new tool, a new methodology, a new way," Fagbenle says.
As for Luke and June, they still each have different roads to take towards fighting to free their daughter, but Fagbenle says he considers the two characters still very much "together in the profound ways."
"I was always comfortable with the ambiguity of their relationship — that ultimately these two people are bonded: They're bonded through trauma and bonded through flesh, and they're bonded through love and commitment and a shared goal … which underpins why they're going to be connected for the rest of their days," he says.
But if the writers had taken the Emmy nominee up on his pitch for Luke's end, Luke and June would have had a very different ending.
"I pitched him dying," the actor reveals. "I had this idea for Luke that he could just go into Gilead on a fool's mission and just get shot. I always think in the real world, people are so much at the mercy of governments and wars and these big things, and when normal humans get put in the mix of that, they often end up dead. And I think there is something that could have been both beautiful and poetic and tragic, of course, about him going, 'Well, OK, I'm going to just go,' and then just end up dead."
That said, he quickly adds that he likes the actual ending better and considers it "probably smarter."
The Handmaid's Tale was the last of the three Emmy-eligible series Fagbenle filmed. His run started with the Presumed Innocent adaptation from David E. Kelley, on which he plays D.A. Nico, whom he describes as "a snooty, American D.A.," and in the middle there was the dark comedy No Good Deed from Liz Feldman, on which he plays Dennis, a struggling writer and father-to-be who gets diagnosed with sarcoidosis.
All three series have allowed Fagbenle to really tap into the tension that comes from both internal and external friction for a character, but in unique ways.
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On Presumed Innocent, Nico carries a lot of disdain for others around him, and many of them find him equally uncomfortable to be around, but because of his professional position, he has to play into politics.
"One of the things that I'm attuned to and looking out for is, what are the ways that a person's disposition are inherently in conflict with the things that he's meeting in his life? And so, for example, [Nico's] a misanthrope, [he] doesn't like people, [he] thinks [he's] better than everybody else, but [he has] to play this game and be very nice and be liked by people and be voted in by people. And so, you've got inherent conflict. I think it's interesting watching someone vacillate between those two because sometimes you fail and let out your inner self and other times not."
On No Good Deed, the conflict for Fagbenle's character comes from his avoidant tendencies, as well as the fact that he allows his mother (Anna Maria Horsford) to be a third wheel in his marriage to Carla (Teyonah Parris).
"I come from a very large family and my family are very influential to me. The culture I come from, it's just very differential and also very connected to the wider family. So all of that stuff was actually much easier for me. It takes some assimilation for me to understand, 'OK, in the U.S. and the U.K., people are a lot more insulated.' I have to do a translation the other way around. This way was very, very intuitive to me," Fagbenle says of that close onscreen mother-son relationship.
But by the end of Season 1 of No Good Deed, Dennis' unwillingness to look at things too closely and his ability to just push things out of his mind leaves him with a big secret. Although Dennis and Carla are very much physically together as husband and wife, having just had a baby and built a brand new house, he accepts money from her estranged father and seems to have promised that man can meet his grandchild, which he is keeping a secret from his wife. All of that seems to set itself up for a juicy, central storyline if and when the show is renewed.
"I just see things from my character's perspective, not so much O-T looking at this character. So I immediately went back to his mindset, which is, 'Don't think about that.' I don't think I ever thought, 'How would it work out for them?' Because he's not thinking that," Fagbenle says.