Sheila Atim: ‘Receiving an MBE is a complex thing, but I want to do the best I can with it’
Tom Ellen
In early summer 2019, those heady days before Covid-19 stripped words such as ‘summer’ of all meaning, Sheila Atim was woken at 8am by a phone call from her mother.
‘She was just talking gibberish,’ the actor says with a grin. ‘I was like: “What are you on about? It’s very early to be calling and making no sense.” Then finally she said: “You’ve got an MBE!” And I was like... “What?!”’
Yes, apparently the notification process for the Queen’s birthday honours list is not dissimilar to the one Hogwarts School uses to initiate new pupils. ‘You literally just get a letter, out of the blue, no warning,’ Atim laughs, talking to me from her east London flat. ‘It went to my mum’s address in Essex and she opened it by accident, which is hilarious because when you see the envelope it’s got “Her Majesty’s Office” written on it in massive letters.’