Osas Okonyon: The Making of a Superstar

It's a few days after the premiere of EVI, the new feature by writer and director Uyoyou Adia, and Osas Okonyon is getting ready for the theatrical release of her first leading-lady role. “I feel like I manifested the role,” Okonyon, a relatively new face in Nollywood, tells OkayAfrica from the set of a shoot in Lagos. EVI is a superstar, and for Okonyon, it feels like a perfect alignment. “I started calling myself a superstar long before I even auditioned, before I even knew that a role like that existed.”

Okonyon chuckles as she recounts a childhood event that came up in a conversation with her sister days before the premiere. It’s about the time she performed to a large congregation in church at seven years old. Her audience was so impressed that they didn’t stop at applause; people walked up to her to give her money afterwards, while she kept reminding everyone that she was a star. “I’ve really just been that big-eyed girl who had always dreamed big,” she says.

The early years of the road to stardom

But dreaming big and pursuing it are two different things. When OkayAfrica first spoke to Okonyon in 2024, she discussed her journey from that child who wanted to be a star to getting her feet on the ground as an actor. 

The journey wasn’t a walk in the park as she had thought. If anything, it was a treacherous hike through a montane forest. Her very first audition — for MTV Shuga — ended before she could say three lines. To make it worse, she was robbed and had to walk and beg bus conductors to make it back home. Then came a role that had her acting and singing as a major character, only for the production to collapse before it ever saw the light of day. “[My hope] wavered a bit, and it made me very sad,” she says.

While acting took another hit after she got a job at a media company, her dreams kept nagging at her. She knew that if she did this, it would require a lot from her. There was a nine-to-five, the scriptwriting and voiceover gigs she took on the side, a period of film school, auditions, and shoots, all squeezed into the margins of a working day. 

The first thing she had to sacrifice was sleep. She would work through the night for her day job and spend the day auditioning for roles or being on set. 

This was her life when the call came for EVI. She had been selected from a sea of online submissions for the audition. At the bottom of the audition notice were the words, “PS: Come looking like a superstar.” For someone who had been declaring exactly that all her life, it felt less like an instruction and more like a sign.

Becoming EVI

She spent the following two weeks playing her audition song, Adele’s “Million Years Ago,” on repeat. She laughs as she says it became her most-listened track of the entire year. And while she hated doing her makeup, she made sure she did it for that audition. The goal was to arrive like a superstar. “I was going to wear a sandal, and I was like, ‘Hmmm… I don’t think a superstar is going to wear a sandal.’” So she walked in wearing heels.

Inside the room, Okonyon saw musicians. Actual recording artists. “I sing, yes, in the choir. I used to do backup for some singers, but that’s the extent of it. I’m not a recording artist myself,” she recalls. Then she quickly catches herself, her voice swelling with pride, “At the time! Because now I am!” When the nerves almost got the better of her, someone on the casting panel complimented her shoes, and that gave her all the extra motivation she needed to deliver like her rent was due.

It was this kind of hunger that got her the biggest yes of her career. “I like people that put in effort when they’re given an instruction, to make sure that they have a fighting chance,” Adia says of the audition day. “Of everybody that came that day, she looked more like a superstar. And she sounded like a superstar, regardless of the fact that five other people sang the same song.”

The women behind the star

When it came to casting the lead, Adia and producer Judith Audu were aligned from the start: it had to be someone new. “There was no time when we were talking about it that I saw someone that was very popular playing that character. That character needed to be authentic, as pure as possible.”

Adia and Audu’s filmmaking partnership has always been defined by giving new talents a chance, whether in front of or behind the camera. Adia herself came up in the industry under Audu’s mentorship and, since then, has grown to become a partner across multiple projects.

What followed her casting was something Okonyon still speaks about with visible warmth. While EVI was telling the story of a superstar finding her light again with the support of a community of women, a similar, deliberate event was unfolding in real life. A group of women, who had themselves navigated every obstacle the industry could throw at them, were making a conscious decision to birth a new star. 

Adia and Audu went out of their way to remind Okonyon that she had already earned her place. Okonyon recalls what Adia told her in the early stages of production: “She said, ‘If you weren’t good enough, if we didn’t think that you were capable, you would not be here.’ When she said that, it was enough for me to know that I had what it took to not disappoint them.” 

“Mama J (Audu) called me one day randomly and was like, ‘I get the sense that you’re nervous and anxious, and I just wanted to tell you that you are here because you are what we wanted. You’re what we were looking for. You’re not here by mistake. You don’t need to prove anything to us anymore,’” Okonyon recalls. 

Now she was ready to tell the story as best as she could, to immerse herself in the character, and deliver on her biggest stage yet. “It’s really amazing when you’re doing stuff with women,” Okonyon says.

On set, sisterhood shaped the work in ways that went beyond morale. “It definitely helped that this story was very much carried by women,” says Okonyon. “I was saying to my director that there’s a way that women write women that is just really different. I was pointing out certain parts of the story and telling her that if a man wrote this scene, it would have been different. If a man wrote this trajectory, it’d have been different.”

The result is a character who is allowed to be complex, flawed, and fully human, Okonyon says. Not a symbol or a cautionary tale, a person. “Because at the end of the day, nobody knows women like women.”

Finding EVI wasn’t hard for Okonyon. “EVI is not an abstract story at all,” she says. “There are so many experiences as a woman that we have heard, seen, and experienced. And just reflecting on my journey as a woman in the industry and in life in general. It was very easy to see these things. In fact, I’d say maybe a little too easy, and that kind of made me very sad, how very commonplace some of these things are.”

For Okonyon, EVI, her first role as a leading star, feels prophetic. Playing that character signals her own arrival. And how does it feel to be here? “Like a dream come true, really,” Okonyon says. “That’s the summary of it. It feels like I’m living in my dreams now.” And for little Osas, who called herself a superstar, “I’m sure she’d be proud. She’d be so proud. But she’d also be like, ‘I said it. I told you.’”