The Story⚡
Nineteen years of steady work. One night that made history: the first time any actress won both Best Lead Actress and Best Supporting Actress at the same AMVCA. And a film aiming to fill a square with fifty thousand people. Linda Ejiofor Suleiman sat down and told the whole story.
Tell Me More
In 2025, Linda Ejiofor Suleiman did something no actress had done at the AMVCAs before: she won Best Lead Actress and Best Supporting Actress on the same night, both decided by a continent-wide jury. It’s the kind of distinction that tends to flatten a career into a single headline moment. But sitting down with host Akintunde Oludamilare on The Actor’s Chair, Linda makes clear that the win was less an arrival than a long-delayed acknowledgment, the visible tip of nineteen years spent mostly out of frame.
The Weight Behind the Wins
The two performances that anchored her historic night, in The Serpent’s Gift and The Herd, mark a shift she describes almost like a professional exhale. For years, she played familiar Nollywood archetypes: the ingénue, the villain, the wife absorbing a family’s grief while holding the household together. It’s work, but it’s work the industry has a habit of looking past. Something changed with these two roles. Audiences stopped watching Linda play a character and started simply watching the character.
She traces the arc candidly. There’s her father, who pulled her out of school to pursue acting and now, she notes, claims the credit for the career that followed. There’s the six-month break she took after having her son- pause- she says quietly cost her professional momentum in an industry that rarely pauses with you. And there’s a prayer she says she prayed three years ago, not for a blockbuster or a franchise, but simply for a role difficult enough to test her.
That prayer, in her telling, is what led to the AMVCA stage, and to a moment she describes physically rather than triumphantly: hearing her name a second time and feeling as though her soul briefly left her body.
Building Black Market
Alongside the AMVCA story, Linda talks at length about Black Market, the Rixel Studios film she leads opposite Lateef Adedimeji. The project carries its own historic ambition: on September 26th, it screens at Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos as part of an attempt to set a Guinness World Record, 50,000 people watching a single Nigerian film in one sitting. She discusses how she landed the role, what it was like acting alongside Adedimeji, and what the scale of the screening means for a film industry still fighting for the infrastructure to match its ambition.
Craft, Typecasting, and What Comes Next
Much of the conversation is a working actor’s account of longevity. Linda discusses how she constructs a believable performance, the deliberate effort to break out of “pretty girl” typecasting, and the Nollywood actresses and directors whose work she studies to keep refining her own. She also opens up about her biggest professional no and her biggest yes, and names the genre she wants to lead in next, a rare moment of an actress nineteen years in still talking about where she hasn’t been yet, rather than where she’s already arrived.
Threaded through all of it is a quieter theme: survival. Not the dramatic kind, but the daily calculus of staying employable, staying interesting, and staying whole inside an industry built on inconsistency. Linda doesn’t dress this up. She talks about it the way anyone talks about a job that has cost them something and given something back in equal, uneven measure.
Watch Full Interview Here
In Summary
Linda Ejiofor Suleiman’s conversation on The Actor’s Chair is less a victory lap than a careful accounting of nineteen years: the interruptions, the refinements, the night the awards arrived in pairs, and the film that aims to fill a public square. The work continues. Anticipate further episodes of The Actor’s Chair, where Africa’s working actors keep sitting down to talk about the craft and the cost of doing it well.
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