Kola Bokinni: “With dementia, you grieve for the person before they die”

“The world keeps going, and that’s a wonderful thing,” Kola Bokinni tells me over Zoom. The actor, who stars as AFC Richmond captain Isaac McAdoo in the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, is reflecting on ways through grief. His father Taiwo died last year, after living with vascular dementia for five years.

While Kola was filming the hit series, long days on set were followed by uncertain nights caring for the man who was known as “everyone’s uncle” on their Peckham estate. His dad used to teach after-school maths lessons for local kids who were struggling with their learning, and his home was a safe haven full of laughter, music and steaming pots of Nigerian food for Kola and his friends when they were teenagers. I can hear a proud smile spread across Kola’s face as he rattles through these memories.

Soon after Taiwo’s passing and craving anonymity, Kola agreed to travel across South America with his cousin Mary Ellen, as contestants on BBC’s Celebrity Race Around The World. In the Argentinian city of Esquina, where he rode horses with gauchos on a riverside ranch, Kola found a moment of healing. He came to the understanding that his loss and the pain that accompanied it is as natural as the ceaseless flow of time itself.

Huck: What’s your earliest memory of your dad?

Kola: You know what, it’s my dad’s smell. It’s mad to think about. He used to smell like fresh newspapers, and old school cologne. It was in this brown bottle. And cigarettes too. I’ve always associated both my parents with smells. My mum used to smell of laundry, and brandy, if she was happy and went out. These days, I like the smell of brandy, that warm smell you get when you open up a bottle of Courvoisier. That’s what they both liked to drink. My dad read the newspaper every day, he smoked, and he drank brandy. In the corner shop, when I smell fresh newspapers in the morning, just after they’ve been delivered, I automatically think of my dad.

Huck: Smell and sound are proper gateways to our memories.

Kola: Yeah … my dad hummed too. He was a hummer, a singer. He sat there, reading his newspaper and humming a tune. I don’t know if it helped him concentrate or just made him happy. But that sticks out in my mind too.

Huck: Your mum was a pub landlady, right? Did you spend much time in the pub when you were growing up?

Kola: I did. It was next to my school in Peckham, innit. I’d go in there, get three quid from my mum and buy my dinner after school. Especially if it was Friday, where she’d be working and couldn’t leave the pub, me and my brother and sister used to band together and go to the chip shop, and then go home.

Huck: Being exposed to different kinds of men in that pub environment must’ve been interesting.

Kola: It kinda defined me, because I’ve got quite a strong personality, you know what I mean? I think it comes from experiencing an adult environment like that at a young age: drinking; smoking; parties; and banter. I wasn’t involved in those things, but I was there. I was quite street smart. I used to walk to school on my own when I was seven. I look at my nephew now. He’s nine. I’m like, ‘this guy can’t go school by himself!’

Huck: How would you describe your dad’s version of masculinity? What was he like as a man?

Kola: My dad was very organised. He woke up every day at exactly the same time. He worked in the same job, for John Lewis, for forty years. He didn’t swear, he didn’t like swearing. And he always had manners. But he was a pub guy too, he’d go there most days and be with his mates. He taught me morals and manners, but also how to have banter, that you can’t walk around angry all the time, cursing the world. Like this is the situation we’re in: carry on.

Huck: It sounds like he was a man who had balance.

Kola: That sums it up. Like every Monday, his friends would come over for a drink. He’d go to the supermarket, come home and cook, then his friends would come over and they’d talk about politics. Every Monday, like clockwork. They’d sit in the living room and talk about Nigerian politics. When he passed, he was eighty-three. My dad was born in 1941. He was old enough to be some of his mates’ dad. Because of his age, I didn’t really know much about my grandparents. They were long gone when I was born. My dad had me at fifty-two. He went from Nigeria to Germany, lived there for a while and was married. And then suddenly left and came to England. He never really spoke about it.

Huck: My dad’s journey was similar, from Egypt to Cyprus and Lebanon, before finding a home in North London. And your dad found a home and community in Peckham.

Kola: Yeah, Peckham was like a hub, like a safe haven. It was like, ‘give them that place because we don’t want it.’ Peckham, Brixton. We made it a home. It was a safe haven for people who weren’t allowed to live their lives in other parts of London. Everyone tries to carve out a life for themselves, because we’re all just put here. I didn’t choose to be Kola. Our dads were just like that. My dad’s name was Taiwo and he tried to make a life for himself. It’s a bit sad that he had me later on in life, because by the time I reached adulthood, he was already an old man. Even before dementia, he couldn’t necessarily remember his experiences from sixty years ago. Some of his stories probably got lost.

Huck: How important was your dad in guiding through your adolescence in Peckham?

Kola: My parents divorced when I was three, and I had a step-dad, but my dad always lived nearby. When we were young, my dad was like everyone’s uncle in the area. He used to hold maths classes and tutor kids in the evening after school. Which meant I had to do extra maths every day! I didn’t like it at the time, but it is a cherished memory. I used to play football near his house when I was in secondary school, and after that I'd go there and eat with him. My dad was an outlet that I could always go to. His place was somewhere I could go that wasn’t my house, but was still a home. Peckham a decade ago wasn’t the best place, and I needed somewhere like that, that safety. All my friends used to come over. My dad would cook, and we’d eat and we’d laugh and we’d listen to music. It was a safe haven for us to hang out and just be boys. That was my dad’s thing.

Huck: My dad had that relationship with the boys from my football team. I might’ve even been a bit jealous of it at the time, but now I appreciate that he was a surrogate dad for a lot of those boys.

Kola: Yeah, we come from areas that are deprived, and also deprived of father figures. Young boys will cling to those figures wherever they find them. Without a positive example of someone living a life that they can look up to, it can go wrong very quickly.

Huck: You were fifteen when your mum passed away. In what ways did that impact your relationship with your dad?

Kola: Before my mum passed, I only saw my dad if I went up to see him after I played football. Now, he was coming round daily with big pots of food that he’d cooked. I saw him more and more. We had to re-establish our relationship, you know what I mean? The dynamic changed, because my sister became my guardian but my dad was around more now too. It was like, ‘I’m your dad, not just an outlet.’ That’s where our relationship blossomed.

If anyone significant passes away, it almost stops your childhood. When my mum passed, that was when my childhood stopped. I had to get a job and help out in the house, and take care of myself. I had to become a man, very quickly. Between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, I wasn’t doing much other than running from my problems. I couldn’t tell you what happened. It was a blur. All I wanted to do was go out and party, like I didn’t care. You don’t know you’re grieving because you’re too young to face or even understand that feeling, so you put it off. I had a thought that I wanted to act, but I didn’t start until I was twenty-two.

Huck: What has acting taught you about masculinity?

Kola: That masculinity isn’t who’s the strongest. And strength comes in so many ways. It’s vulnerability. It’s intelligence. It’s culture. You get taught these things when you’re learning how to act. But my dad never understood drama [laughs]! He’s Nigerian, innit. He’d be like, ‘nice, you’re on the TV. When do you start your real job?’ Nigerians are all about the financial, boy.

Huck: What did the experience of caring for your dad while he lived with dementia do to your relationship with memory?

Kola: It makes you appreciate memories, because they’re not promised. But that can also stop you from being present. You think, ‘I should cherish this memory,’ but that can take you out of the moment.

Huck: When my dad was diagnosed with dementia, I made a point of planning all these nice experiences to share with him, but then I’d find myself getting frustrated when he’d forget them almost instantly afterwards. That shouldn’t be why we do things, right?

Kola: Exactly. You’re not doing things to remember them after, you’re doing them now. You have no idea what might happen later down the line so you should just enjoy that meal with your dad, there and then. If I’m eating my favourite food, I’m not gonna be like, ‘ah, I might not remember eating this later you know [laughs]!’ It’s like going on a rollercoaster, innit. You’re paying for something that you’ll stop feeling the moment it stops, but that doesn’t stop you feeling it.

Huck: Did the experience of losing your mum fortify you, for lack of a better word, when facing your dad’s diagnosis?

Kola: With dementia, it’s almost like you grieve for the person before they die. Before I lost my dad, I’d already lost my dad. It gets to the point where they’re completely gone and their body is just going through the motions, being fed, being changed. And sometimes they’re fully angry. My dad would physically fight me, bro. Like, ‘I don’t wanna eat!’ I was filming Ted Lasso, season one. We’d finish at seven in the evening. I’d get home after, and I remember putting the key in the door, not knowing what kind of situation I was about to enter into. Like, ‘what has he done today?’ One time, I got home and he was not there. We found him a day later, barefoot, in his pajamas, on Westminster Bridge with a spoon in his pocket, talking about, ‘I brought this incase I got hungry.’ He’d been gone for twelve hours. That was the moment where I realised I had no control over what happened to him when I left the house.

Huck: Are there any specific lessons you learnt from caring for your dad?

Kola: Definitely to be more present, observant, and mindful. But also, caring for someone in this situation makes you realise that life isn’t that deep to be holding onto any grudges. It’s helped me relax, because memories are not guaranteed, so why cloud them with bad things? Some people don’t know how to let go of things, but dementia forces a person to do that. Yesterday is gone. It makes you realise how trivial and small some things are. In the end, it doesn’t matter. We’re only here for a short time, and to spend that time in hatred, nah bruv.

Huck: On the episode of Race Celebrity Around The World where you spoke about your dad, his diagnosis and his passing, you described how travelling has helped you heal. Why do you think that was the case?

Kola: My dad died on Halloween last year, and when I decided to do the show it was very fresh. It felt like the perfect thing to do because everything in London was a reminder, and there was a lot of sadness and sympathy from everyone. I was kind of fed up with that. Disconnecting my phone and getting dashed into the wilderness was what I needed to do! It was like being in a real life escape dream.

Huck: You said that beautiful thing about realising you’re ‘not the main character of life’.

Kola: When you go to a place where nobody knows who you are, you understand that you’re not the centre of the universe. Life goes on. An uncountable amount of people have experienced the same loss as you. People have trodden that same path, they’ve come and they’ve gone. One day I’m gonna go, too. But at that moment, I was exactly where I needed to be.

Huck: What would dad have said if he’d seen you riding that horse?

Kola: ‘Get off the horse.’

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