Dodging the group messages is something Izuka can take in her stride but nothing could quite prepare Izuka for an attack on her senses whilst filming. “One of the days the art department forgot to put the f**king fish in the real fridge,” she laughs, “and we had to work with the smell of rotten fish for two days. Literally my eyes are filled with tears through a scene that involves no emotion. They built an entire kitchen for us and put it in the fake fridge. It had fake toilets, fake everything. People did take a sh*t. People were using our stuff and not realising.”
Whilst the world was fake, the show and it’s cast is very reflective of the world we *actually* live in. You watch Boiling Point and see all faces of society reflected back and at no point does this feel like tokenism. Stepping onto this set for Izuka was empowering to say the least. “At times it was cathartic, too,” she admits, “because if there’s things that you’re pulling from that still hit a nerve when you’re able to act them out again with people who are with you and understand it’s incredibly empowering. It’s the dream, actually, because ultimately that’s why everyone should get into acting and the arts. It’s to represent people like yourself that you’ve known growing up and then be able to educate people furthermore, or help people feel seen on their TV screen. When you do that and the response to it is exactly how you wanted it to be, it fuels you for war.”
I ask when Izuka, who grew up in Edinburgh, first felt seen on screen. “I remember on stage before I remember on screen. I was 18 and I saw The Lion King in London and it was like something was awakened within me immediately. I’d never seen so many people of colour on stage before and also traditional African music as well. It wasn’t something that I grew up with, but it was something that I was connected to and that I was missing. Also when I went to drama school at 18 and I moved to London that hit me like nothing else. To suddenly go from a city that was pretty much white and my sister and I were one of very few people in a school of thousands and to come to London and suddenly on every corner I turned, there was somebody that was not only a person of colour, but women that were gorgeous, that were curvaceous things I didn’t see every day in Scotland. I was always very much the odd one, not the odd one out, but I just wasn’t like the other gals. So to come to London it was just heaven on earth. It was just so cool to see people that were like me. But on screen, I’m trying to think and nothing comes to mind immediately, which maybe says a lot. There was never really a leading character or somebody that I was like, ‘f**k me, that’s me!’”
Boiling Point is therefore a show even Izuka couldn’t have dreamed of when she started her acting career which has seen her star on the West End as the OG Katherine Parr in the feminist all singing, all dancing retelling of Henry VIII and his six wives in Six: The Musical, star alongside Dakota Johnson in Netflix’s Persuasion and earn her comedy chops in Channel 4’s Big Boys. “Watching this when I was younger would’ve made me realise how big the world is, how colourful the world is and maybe where I was at the time wasn’t the full picture. There was so much to discover and be patient, you’ll find that very soon. I would’ve felt seen. I would’ve been so much kinder to myself in terms of the way that I look and I felt about myself,” Izuka says.