Gugu Mbatha-Raw discusses her role in Possession, a Sky supernatural thriller that connects a contemporary inheritance dispute in Jamaica with the legacy of British plantation slavery. She says the drama explores how unresolved history can continue to affect the present, while her character, a Bristol lawyer of mixed Jamaican heritage, becomes increasingly connected to a background she had kept at a distance.

Mbatha-Raw plays Claudia, who is sent to Jamaica after a wealthy descendant of a white plantation owner leaves his estate to an untraceable Jamaican man rather than his own family. Initially selected partly for the “optics” of being a Black, half-Jamaican lawyer, Claudia faces a case in which legal questions give way to supernatural and historical forces; the series moves between modern Jamaica and the era of plantation slavery. The 43-year-old actor says she chooses varied, politically ambitious roles, following work in Belle, Black Mirror, The Morning Show and Surface.