Abubakar Salim was looking forward to a “really chill” week until he was needed on set. “All I’ll say is it’s Michaela Coel‘s new show,” he confides, before going on to reveal a bit more than he’s probably allowed. Salim has already completed a filming block in Ghana but this week’s shoot is closer to home in east London. “She’s a good mate of mine, I love her to bits,” Salim says of Coel, the BAFTA-winning star and creator of 2020’s savage revenge drama I May Destroy You. “She’s also a force of nature.”
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The two actors met a decade ago when they shared a scene in ‘Nosedive’, a memorable episode of Black Mirror about a young woman obsessed with social media. “Michaela was [playing] ‘Airline Stewardess Number One’ and I was ‘Airport Security Guard Number Two,” Salim recalls. “But since then, she’s done everything. She’s a superstar now.”
Salim’s rise has also been impressive – he developed the beautiful BAFTA-winning video game Tales of Kenzera: Zau and now stars in prestige fantasy series House Of The Dragon – but he’s too modest to say so. When we meet at the British Film Institute café in central London, where every other customer is tapping away on a laptop, Salim is full of apologies after arriving slightly late. He and his wife recently moved to Surrey with their one-year-old daughter, so he’s still getting used to commuter trains. “And now I’m filming five minutes from my old patch in east London – ridiculous!” he says with a smile.
After fetching the coffees – a generous gesture that his loquacious conversation lives up to – Salim settles in to chat House Of The Dragon. He joined the preposterously epic Game Of Thrones spin-off in its second season as seafaring Alyn Of Hull, the bastard son of Lord Corlys Velaryon (Steve Toussaint). “The only thing I had to teach myself was patience,” Salim says, “because it’s such a big show and for the whole of season two I was just waiting [to set sail] on that fucking dock!”
Thankfully, Alyn has moved inland during season three, which is streaming weekly on HBO Max. If you’re not fully up to date, brace yourself for spoilers. After being given the Velaryon name by his father – a hugely validating moment for Alyn, who was ashamed of being illegitimate – he now has a seat at the council of Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D’Arcy). “I think that’s enough for Alyn,” Salim says. “He just wanted to be recognised and have that sense of family.”
Well, almost enough, anyway. In the latest episode, which aired on Monday (July 27), we see Alyn grow closer – much closer – to intrepid dragon-rider Baela Targaryen (Bethany Antonia). “I don’t want to bring race into it but, especially when I was growing up, the idea of a Black character being a love interest wasn’t really a thing, unless you were watching something like [sporting romcom] Love & Basketball,” Salim says. “I mean, it wasn’t really a thing on such a huge, fantastical scale as this [show].”
“The online stuff is all echo chambers, right?”
During its eight-season run in the 2010s, Game Of Thrones was roundly criticised for its lack of Black characters – a problem that afflicts the fantasy genre as a whole. House Of The Dragon has taken steps to redress the balance by casting Black actors as members of House Velaryon, who were depicted as having “silver-gold hair, pale skin and violet eyes” in George R.R. Martin’s source novels.
At the same time, Alyn and Baela’s mid-episode kiss felt enormously affirming for Salim personally as an actor. “There was a real big sense of ‘maybe I can be fucking dashing’, you know,” he says with palpable enthusiasm. He expects the couple’s blossoming romance to wrongfoot fans who are still mourning Baela’s previous lover, Jacaerys (Harry Collett), who was brutally murdered in episode one, and processing her rebound frisson with Alyn’s younger brother, Addam (Clinton Liberty).
“Clinton’s a fucking beautiful kid and incredibly charismatic, so even I would ship them,” Salim says. “So when they see Baela get with misery guts over here, I know the fans will be like: ‘What the hell?'” Still, Salim doesn’t seem too bothered by the constant discourse surrounding the show, which can get prickly. “The online stuff is all echo chambers, right?” he says with a shrug. “But when I see a giant poster of my face on Tottenham Court Road, that’s when I realise: ‘Wow, this is big.’”
Salim’s interest in acting began not with bingeing the latest must-see TV show, but with gaming. Growing up in Welwyn Garden City, a leafy commuter town 20 miles north of London, he rarely watched television and found reading a struggle because of his dyslexia. “But I really got into playing Dungeons & Dragons with my friends,” he says.
Role-playing as a wizard or paladin provided an escape from the more regimented aspects of his upbringing. “I remember having so much fun playing all these different characters because at home I was very much the young Muslim boy, the young African boy, attending [family] religious events where everyone was older than me.”
“The final goal is always about the truth and honesty I can bring to a project”
At this point, he shares a slightly spooky story. “I was part of this little local theatre group where the drama teacher would put on competitions – pure physical theatre, nothing spoken. And I was playing Satan in Dante’s Inferno, as you do,” he recalls. “Anyway, after the performance, this guy came up to me and said: ‘Hey, you were good. You should consider doing this seriously.'” Salim still has no idea who this encouraging stranger was. “I have a feeling they were an angel or a ghost or something,” he says without a hint of archness. “But whatever they were, they triggered something inside of me.”
So at 16, he applied for the National Youth Theatre (NYT), a subsidised arts programme that counts Helen Mirren, Daniel Day-Lewis and Idris Elba among its alumni. Salim was so bullish that he told himself he’d take a different path – possibly joining the army – if he wasn’t accepted on his first attempt. “I was so green and so lucky,” he says of acing his audition. “I didn’t realise then that hearing ‘no’ is a big part of an actor’s life.” Alongside his NYT sessions, he also took classes at the Identity School Of Acting, which aims to “disrupt the industry with a new, diverse generation of talent”, where his classmates included John Boyega, Letitia Wright and Malachi Kirby.
Two years later, Salim received another affirming sign from the universe when he did a “terrible” audition for one drama school, but totally nailed another. Soon, he was studying at the prestigious London Academy Of Music And Dramatic Art (LAMDA) on a full scholarship. “I always joke that I made more money at drama school than I did when I started working,” he says knowingly.
It wasn’t long before a life-changing opportunity was dangled in front of him. “I auditioned for Star Wars: The Force Awakens during drama school and I was convinced it was going to be me,” Salim recalls, affecting an eye roll at his brash youthful confidence. “No way, no fucking way! Cut to John Boyega getting it.”
At the same time, Salim had much bigger things to worry about. His father had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer, so he spent his uni years shuttling between acting classes in London and his family home an hour away. The last time his father saw him perform was in a student production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Poignantly, Salim went off-script to show his character offering tender patriarchal approval to his daughter, who had fallen in love with someone ill-advised.
Salim lost his father as he was graduating but there was barely time to grieve. “I was really fortunate to have got an agent and I was living the actor’s dream: doing one job and having another lined up afterwards,” he says. But in time, something had to give. Two months into a high-profile project that he declines to name out of respect for the actor who replaced him, Salim made the difficult decision to step away. “I felt like this job was taking me away from healing and being able to digest everything,” he says. “And Michaela [Coel] gave me some really great advice: ‘Think about how many other people are really desperate for this role. Why are you doing it if you’re not enjoying it?'”
Since then, Salim has built up his career more mindfully. In 2017, he auditioned for what he was told was a “new animated TV show”, but turned out to be the next major instalment in the Assassin’s Creed games, Origins. Naturally, as a seasoned gamer, Salim rumbled the ruse.
“The [audition] director was laughing because I was telling him more about the franchise and what it means to be an assassin than he knew himself,” Salim says with a laugh. But when he landed the role, his fondness for the franchise only added to the pressure. “The film was about to come out [starring Michael Fassbender], so it felt quite make-or-break at the time,” Salim says. “And honestly, I was terrified. Am I going to be the one who kills this franchise? But fortunately, the game did really well.”
Then, after supporting roles in a couple of slightly underrated series – the historical romp Jamestown and Arctic thriller Fortitude – Salim landed a lead in the dystopian sci-fi drama Raised By Wolves. This lavish HBO Max series, which followed an android couple (Salim and Amanda Collin) as they brought up a human family on a remote space colony, ran for two seasons in 2020 and 2022.
Ridley Scott, one of the show’s executive producers, was so impressed that he cast Salim as a French Army general in his 2023 epic Napoleon. “Someone on Ridley’s level saying ‘yes’ to me was a pivotal moment,” Salim says. “It gave me the confidence to start telling my own stories.” In 2020, Salim started his own gaming development company, Silver Rain, which he later renamed Surgent Studios. Four years later, his team won the BAFTAs’ Game Beyond Entertainment accolade for Tales Of Kenzera: Zau, which was informed by Salim’s Kenyan heritage and grief over his father.
Now, thanks to House Of The Dragon‘s lengthy shoots and huge cast list, he can divide his trailer time between running lines and running a business. Any future acting role has to pass a firm but flexible threshold. “Obviously, life comes into it. Is it going to take me away from my family? Is it going to pay my rent?” Salim says. “But I think the final goal is always about the truth and honesty I can bring to a project, otherwise it will just be a shitshow. I learned early on not to do something for the sake of it.”
‘House Of The Dragon’ season three airs weekly on Mondays in the UK on Sky Atlantic and streams on NOW and HBO Max