Melvin Alusa: I joined acting to impress my crush
Actor Melvin Alusa in the film Mission to Rescueduring the launch of Baze at Michael Joseph Center on May 27, 2021.
Actors often say that the roles they play in films and series change their lives. For Melvin Alusa, acting saved his.
After completing high school, Melvin saw that there would be no chance for him to enrol in university, given his financial situation, but he knew he was made for more.
“I got into acting in 2005. Before then, I tried out different jobs such as sales promotion for brands such as Tusker where I earned Sh300 per day. Then I was offered a job as a makanga (conductor) which paid me Sh500 per day. That sounded like a good deal to me to get Sh4,000 per month at the time,” the actor recalls.
Melvin, however, believed that he was capable of doing much more than casual labour and applied for a salesperson job advertised in the newspaper to work at a clothing store. He got it.
“From selling beer in Nairobi downtown to touting to selling clothes at Woolworths in Yaya Centre... Surprisingly, I actually turned out to be good at it, but I was still dissatisfied. One of my clients was the CEO of an airline that was launching its operations in Nairobi who offered me a job. I resigned from my job, went for the interview and waited to start my new job, only for the company to collapse as I was about to start. Once again, I was unemployed,” he said.
Another client offered him a job as a salesperson at a travel agency but by this time, the 25-year-old Melvin was fed up with the trajectory of his life.
One day, as he was leaving work, he saw a familiar face that changed everything for him.
“I saw my childhood crush cross Mama Ngina Street and everything started moving in slow motion like in the movies. I had to make sure I got a date with her. She told me she was part of a musical that was being planned at All Saints Cathedral. My intention was to be around her, so I thought of how I could get involved in her life. I ended up auditioning for the musical and got a part,” he laughed.
Melvin Alusa.
With no prior acting experience, Melvin was determined to execute the role perfectly in the musical that had him interacting with media personality Johnson Mwakazi, who was the lead character.
“I truly enjoyed it. I played Mordecai in the play inspired by the biblical story of Esther at Kenya National Theatre. The stage was electric and I knew this is where I belonged. I then met the late Jacob Otieno who was a theatre director and who affirmed that I could make a living out of acting. That’s when I quit my sales job and the rest is history.”
Under the wing of Jacob, he started off with theatre plays based on books until he caught his big break on Makutano Junction.
“The set was very professional with good pay in comparison to what was being offered in the industry at the time. I was learning on the job since I had no background, so I was also a bit timid. Then I stumbled upon the search for the face of Celtel in 2007, auditioned and got the role that led to billboard and television advertisements with my face on them,” he narrates.
More advertisement jobs with Tusker, Pilsner and Guinness kept him afloat as he came to learn that well-paying acting jobs did not come as frequently as he would have liked them to.
Melvin says that if he did not discover his passion for acting, he would have enlisted in the army. As fate would have it, he came to play the leading role of Captain Baraza in the film Mission to Rescue, which is based on the true story of the al-Shabaab abduction of a French tourist from her home in Lamu near the Kenya-Somalia border in 2011.
The film was the 2021 Kenyan entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 94th Academy Awards. He won the Best Lead Actor Award for the same role at the Zanzibar Film Festival in 2021 where the film won the Best East Africa Feature Film. He was also nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Award at the 17th Africa Movie Academy Awards for the same role.
“Since the beginning of my career, I found myself playing antagonist roles, which are usually the villains or the bad guys of the story,” he said.
Melvin Alusa says had he not been an actor, he would be in the military.
Captain Baraza was among the first leading roles he took up as a hero figure in his career.
His latest appearance was in Country Queen, which was Kenya's first series on Netflix. Alongside other Kenyan leading actors, the show touched on social injustices such as land grabbing and child labour, taking on a very relatable story for Kenyan audiences. Melvin says the compelling story was a result of an intense writing process that took almost two years.
“An average actor can rise up to the challenge when a script is intense and tight. The role of Kyalo is now a landmark in my career. I got to play a man that is passionate and multi-layered as just we are as human beings. It was filmed in Nairobi and Machakos. I am not surprised by the success it enjoyed, he said. “Kenyans have started appreciating more Kenyan content such as Country Queen which was in the top three for almost two weeks at the time of its release on Netflix last year.”
Melvin was also part of the reality show Big Brother Africa in the last season of the show in 2014, with contestants from 13 African countries competing for $300,000 which was equivalent to Sh25 million at that time. The show is a social experiment that places a number of strangers to live and co-exist in a house together while being isolated from the rest of the world, being recorded all the time and having no privacy. One by one, they get evicted from the house by viewers or “housemates” as they are called.
“I used to fancy being on a reality show. I saw that I could match their energy. I then qualified to get in. I had got to a point where I wanted to be seen continentally. When we got to the house, I was the oldest contestant at 33 at the time. Most of the housemates were in their early twenties, which made it harder to stay there. I was evicted after a month,” he said.
His plan to get seen continentally worked when he landed the role of Justin Mitwa in the film adaptation of the book The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind which is based on a true story. It is about a boy in Malawi who is thrown out of a school he loves when his family can no longer afford the fees. Sneaking back into the school library, he finds a way, using the parts of a bicycle belonging to his father (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor), to build a windmill that could save his village from famine.
“They held auditions in Kenya and South Africa, where they could find more experienced actors. We had to learn how to speak like Malawians. So, we had a dialogue coach who taught us how to speak like the locals. Chiwetel, who was also the director and one of the lead actors, is very thorough. He would go through the scenes with the actors, say how he feels and the dialogue coach is listening to how you are speaking.”
“By the time you are stepping on set, you are well prepared because of the support you have received. What is left for you is to perform because everything has been made available to support you.”
Coming back home, Melvin admits that the Kenyan film industry has a long way to go, especially in how they treat cast members.
“Productions are very expensive. Sometimes, we do not pump in enough money to fund the production. When investors hand the money to the producers, perhaps they see a business opportunity to cut corners which would be at the expense of the quality of the production. It should not be at the expense of the actor’s space and psychological comfort to execute a role.”
Earlier this year, Melvin announced that he would be leaving the production of Salem through an Instagram post due to unacceptable working conditions. He says the show could have been produced better by ensuring the mental sensitivity of the cast and crew.
“An actor should not act every day. Since it is a daily show, there are a lot of curveballs in the show to make it interesting. You can find that in a week, the whole script requires you to cry or hate someone. For actors to make it believable, we kind of have to channel that energy towards that person.”
What people do not know about the 42-year-old actor is that he is a proud father to eight children—the oldest being 14 years old and the youngest, two. Four of them are two sets of twins.
“I am a single parent. There are moments I feel overwhelmed, frustrated and want to throw in the towel. It was not a situation I imagined I would be in but the love and joy they give me supersedes everything else. I learned how to manage finances with side hustles.”
He will be starting a reality show to highlight his parenthood journey with the hope that a parent who has abandoned their children or abdicated their duties will see the kind of joy that children can bring to their life.
“However, I am not intending to have any more children,” he laughs.
The actor wishes to work with international stars such as Dwayne Johnson, Will Smith and Viola Davis on stories that are not only entertaining but also address human rights issues.
It is a dream not far out of reach as he has already been nominated for an International Emmy Award in 2013 at the Cannes Film Festival for a radio series he co-directed, Jongo Love, that examined relationships and family planning in urban Kenya.
He hopes this dream will come true by being signed by an international agency to secure auditions in productions abroad.
