BAZ BAMIGBOYE: Lenny Henry reveals playing a servant who 'doesn't get three meals a day' and becoming vegetarian is the real reason for his weight loss

Published: 22:51 BST, 5 July 2018 | Updated: 12:34 BST, 6 July 2018

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Lenny Henry has broken his silence about the reason for his weight loss

Lenny Henry has broken his silence about the reason for his weight loss — it’s all to do with being 45 years a slave.

The actor is playing the wily Godfrey, enslaved as a servant in the ‘big house’ of a sugar plantation in Jamaica in the three-part television adaptation of Andrea Levy’s novel The Long Song.

‘I have heard that I’ve lost all this weight for a variety of reasons,’ he chuckled. ‘None of them true.’

He explained that the ‘true’ version is that he’s playing a man ‘who doesn’t get three full meals a day’ and that he could hardly have played the part ‘without losing a few pounds’.

The 59-year-old told me that as soon as he was cast in the three-part adaptation of Levy’s 2010 novel, set in the years around emancipation, he began the mainly vegetarian diet.

Lenny’s bald pate and sideburns reminded me of the look, but not the behaviour, of Samuel L. Jackson’s monstrous Uncle Tom in Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained.

In turn, Lenny’s Mr Godfrey, as the house underlings call him, has worked for 45 years on the Amity plantation and become a master of small deceptions and little acts of rebellion. He’s mischievous rather than cruel.

Lenny has shot scenes on location in the Dominican Republic and interior scenes in the UK. He’s due to shoot further segments in the Caribbean with the drama’s key stars Tamara Lawrance as July, the tale’s unreliable narrator; Hayley Atwell as Caroline, the plantation owner’s sister; and Jack Lowden as Robert, the lothario who fulfils the romantic needs of both women.

Arinzé Kene has been cast as July’s adult son who negotiates with his mother to publish her memoirs. (Kene’s show Misty will transfer from the Bush Theatre to Trafalgar Studios from September 8. Lenny said he’s a fan of Kene’s and is eager for Misty to do well.)

We were chatting at the South Bank Sky Arts Awards ceremony at the Savoy, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, and I can report Lenny ate a healthy lunch of goat’s cheese and potato terrine with cured beetroot starter followed by forest mushroom risotto with roasted red pepper ragout.

The Long Song, a joint production between the BBC and David Heyman (the producer behind the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films) will probably be shown on the BBC next spring.