‘Bel-Air’ Star Jimmy Akingbola Opens Up About His ITV Documentary ‘Handle With Care’: “I Felt Like I Hadn’t Seen An Inspiring, Positive Care Story On TV”
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Jimmy Akingbola, who plays Geoffrey in Peacock’s Bel-Air remake, has opened up about making a “positive story about adoption” to help inspire Black children in care in the upcoming ITV documentary Handle with Care.
Previous shows about adoption have tended to focus on “mining trauma,” the Kate & Kojo, In the Long Run and Ted Lasso star told Deadline, and he wanted to “flip the script but without dismissing these other stories”in Handle with Care. “I have had to overcome a lot of difficulties but overall my experience was positive,” Akingbola said of his time growing up after being adopted by a white family at age 2, when he left his Nigerian parents. “I felt like I hadn’t seen an inspiring, positive care story on TV and instead there is this trend of only putting something on if it is really harrowing.
I wanted to go the other way and think how I could inspire a 14- or 15-year-old version of myself. So whenever my fear [of making the show] got to a bad stage I thought if I can just help one young person then that’s enough.” The number of UK children in care has risen by a massive 28% in the past decade to almost 500,000, and more than 40% awaiting adoption are Black, with Black foster families rare in comparison.
Akingbola, who speaks openly about growing up in a loving adoptive family, stressed that he doesn’t want to devalue previous shows and books on the subject, adding: “There is nuance here — we need to go beyond the clickbait and ‘black and white’ view of these stories.” Akingbola spends most of his time in Los Angeles and plays Geoffrey, the butler, in Peacock’s top-rated Bel-Air reboot.
Read more on deadline.com
