Daniel Kaluuya, Kane “Kano” Robinson and I are in a frou-frou hotel in London, all flowery cushions and curly mirrors, discussing differences. Differences between what home means when you’re young and when you’re older, differences between being good at something and being passionate about it, and the difference between a movie and a film. A movie, according to them, is big: ambitious, widescreen, built for success. A film is smaller: personal, niche, hopeful of attention.

The Kitchen is a new Netflix drama that Kaluuya wrote, produced and co-directed with Kibwe Tavares, and in which Robinson (Kano for his music) stars. The Kitchen is definitely, they say, a movie.

“We’re making a MOVIE!”” says Robinson to Kaluuya. “I remember early days, when you were talking about The Kitchen, that’s what you kept saying. It was distinctly a movie versus a film. Like the anti-kitchen sink.”

Kaluuya laughs. “We’re not kitchen sink, we’re the whole kitchen. The whole fucking room.”

Kaluuya, 34, has a big, infectious laugh, and I’m happy to hear it. We’re about 15 minutes into the interview, and at the start, he wasn’t laughing at all. Everything had been a bit rushed. They were both late for the photos, because of grooming and styling, and though the photographer worked amazingly quickly, they still have to leave at a non-negotiable time, because Kaluuya is acting in another film, and he’s due on set.

So there was a slight air of tension during pictures (the room was packed with stylists and PRs), and for the first 10 minutes of our interview, Kaluuya hardly speaks. He doesn’t seem grumpy, just unforthcoming, his big eyes assessing. But then he suddenly perks up (he likes my big notebook, he tells me, it reminds him of his school books) and the atmosphere changes, snap! Like the sun coming out. That’s how charismatic Kaluuya is. When he shines, you see not only the dazzling Oscar-winning acting hero, but the director who can motivate and encourage, get everyone grinning and working together. When he’s in, he’s all in.

Robinson, 38, also charming, is more even, less front foot. Fans of his music know his dynamics – he can move from introspection to cold anger to up-in-your-face energy – and he can be rigorous, as well as raucous. But when he, too, breaks into guffaws, it’s like the hotel room is a balloon. Up we go!

Both are hugely popular and respected. Kaluuya has given brilliant performances in films as wildly different as Get Out, Queen & Slim, Black Panther and Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and won an Oscar in 2021 for his portrayal of Fred Hampton in Judas and the Black Messiah. Robinson, whose last two albums, 2016’s Made in the Manor and 2019’s Mercury-nominated Hoodies All Summer, received extensive critical acclaim, spent 2018 to 2023 playing main man Sully in possibly the most influential UK TV series of recent years, Top Boy. They are big stars, and to get the two of them in the same room is a coup. When I tell people I’m interviewing Robinson and Kaluuya, together, they practically faint.

They’ve been friends for ages, but neither can recall how or where they met. When I ask, they look at each other, puzzled. “From about, just London” is the conclusion. So who stays at parties the longest? They both burst out laughing.

“He stays the longest,” says Kaluuya, “but while I’m there!”

Robinson: “Two hours turns into 10…”

Kaluuya: “I like to stay! I love music, I love music.”

Robinson: “He’s the party starter!”

They are full of mischief. A few weeks after our interview, they both travel to the US to promote The Kitchen, and, on Instagram, you can see their “out out” vibe: messing around at basketball games, playing for the camera. These boys work and then, they play.

That serious but fun mood is woven through The Kitchen, which is set on a dilapidated council estate called the Kitchen in a dystopian, near-future London. Authoritarian outside forces attack the estate, but among the residents, there’s solidarity and joy. A sequence in a roller disco, where everyone joins in the Candy dance, is about as upbeat a nightclub scene as I’ve ever seen on film.

“Yeah,” says Robinson. “When that scene wrapped, we were meant to leave, but you [Kaluuya] were like, Noooo!”

“I was with the DJ going, ‘Drop another one, drop another one,”’’ says Kaluuya. “And she played Pop Smoke and it went off! And then I was like, ‘Play Kano…!’ That scene is real because it was real. You can feel it.”

The Kitchen took a long time to come to screen – Kaluuya started writing it as far back as 2012 – but he and co-director Tavares always had Robinson in mind for the main part, and involved him throughout, exchanging ideas on voice notes and WhatsApps. Originally, Kaluuya’s film concept was inspired by the moped gangs that rob places such as the Westfield shopping centre, a sort of Robin Hood tale, but gradually that aspect moved into the background. Instead, he focused on the story of Izi, a loner and long-term Kitchen resident, played by Robinson.

As Izi, Robinson conveys a lot with just a facial flicker – his eyes are especially expressive – and Kaluuya says, as a director, he really “leaned in” to this subtle performance, “a blink, or a look, those nuances, those details, we took the tone from that”. Such fine-drawn character acting is what Kaluuya loves about British cinema, and he wanted that in The Kitchen, but married to the scale and ambition of a US movie. “I love British film, yes, but we can still be big. My point is: we [can] do what we want. It’s just a story. Everything’s made up. So make it epic, man. Why not?”

The epicness in The Kitchen comes especially from the fantastic visuals. The estate itself is like a concrete Brazilian favela: sprawling, rickety, labyrinthine, patched up, with familiar London landmarks such as the Eye seen in the near distance. On the ground, in the Kitchen market, all is neon-lit and buzzing with life. But the flats and upper walkways are wrecked, barricaded, barely functional. And every so often, the estate comes under attack, from an anonymous, shield- and baton-wielding riot police-cum-army. The residents bang pan lids when the attackers arrive, like Belfast wives during the Troubles.

Despite such international references, and its heightened, offbeat weirdness, The Kitchen is recognisably set in London.

“Yeah, it feels like London,” says Robinson. “The London I grew up in, the confidence and bravado and community and connection between the people… Usually, when you make a film about an attack, it becomes a film about the attacker, as opposed to the people under attack. What we wanted to explore was those people’s identity and [sense of] community in spite of the attacks.”

We see flats on another estate, too: new-built, expensive, sterile. This is the Buena Vida apartment complex. The concierge is a computer. There’s not much of a community. It’s here that Izi aspires to buy, the wipe-clean atmosphere offering a new start. He doesn’t like the Kitchen. He calls it a “shithole”.

Actually, Robinson, who thinks hard about the authenticity of his acting, says he struggled a bit with Izi’s attitude. Izi deliberately isolates himself from the community, because he knows he wants to leave. We first see him hogging the only functioning shower, a queue of other residents waiting. “It was hard to get my head around the way Izi is,” he says, “because, in that same scenario, I don’t see myself being the character who would just want to get out, to leave everyone he’s grown up around, who are really fighting for each other, caring for each other. But Izi sees it a completely different way, like: ‘We’re going to lose. This is my solo mission. I want out.’”

The central relationship of the film is between Izi and Benji, played beautifully by newcomer Jedaiah Bannerman, with a young teenager’s heartbreaking mix of defiance and vulnerability. Benji tries to crack Izi’s solo approach and become close to him. A father-son dynamic develops between the pair, and we talk about that. There’s a parallel in the film with Kaluuya’s own background, as his dad was in Uganda until he was 15, and Kaluuya definitely didn’t want to contribute to what he calls the “flattened narrative about black fathers”.

“A lot of them just don’t know how [to be fathers],” he says. “It’s an uncomfortable thing to talk about, like: ‘How does someone figure that out?’ They have to process what they haven’t had, or what they haven’t seen. They’re scared to make mistakes, and maybe a lot of the time it’s probably best that some of them aren’t involved in people’s lives. And in the film… you want to explore the honesty of that. I don’t think the film judges Izi, it just says he’s going through some shit. And he’s doing the best he can.”

After they wrapped the main part of the film, a few months later, Robinson and Bannerman had to shoot a couple of significant pick-up scenes. During that time off, Robinson became a father himself. “And I just saw it all in a completely different way,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I don’t think I could ever be like this with my son.’ That super tough love. Knowing you’ve done wrong, but also trying not to show it. But I understand how Izi got to that place.”

For much of the film, Izi doesn’t really want to know Benji, so Benji hooks up with a local gang, led by Staples (Hope Ikpoku Jr), whose attitude is the opposite to Izi’s. Staples welcomes Benji into his orphan family crew and urges him to join in their fight to stay in the Kitchen. For Kaluuya and Robinson, this is another of the movie’s most important themes. Are you in or are you out? Do you leave, when you could stay and make it better?

“Why do you want to make it better?” says Kaluuya. “That’s my thing. I watched all these films about working-class people, and the undercurrent is always, ‘Where we’re from is shit.’ Like the writer is saying: ‘I’m really happy that I left. Look at what I left.’ The end point is the leaving, that’s the achievement. So with Izi, instead of his end point being leaving, I was like, how about his start point being ‘I want to leave’, and explore what kind of man is that. Let him evolve, see what might make him come back. Like The Wizard of Oz, there’s no place like home…”

“Living in London,” says Robinson, “there’s young boys growing up on the estate, talking about wanting to get out of the ends. That’s all you hear. ‘I want to get out of the ends. I want to play football and get out of the ends. I want to be a musician and get out of the ends…’”

“And I get it,” says Kaluuya, “when people have reasons to leave. But it’s that thing of: ‘Do you not like what it is? Do you not appreciate the beauty of it, the mindset of where it is and where you’re from and what you’re doing? The connection that you have?’ Why can’t we just be us?”

* * *

Kaluuya grew up in Camden/Kentish Town, with his Ugandan mum, who works for a special educational needs school, and his older sister. He stayed on his estate, Camelot House, for many years, even after he got successful. He had his own little flat there, and would go and do an acting job, sometimes for months at a time, then come back.

But, after a while, he found that this stopped working. Friends kept telling him he shouldn’t stay, that things were different and people were moving on, other people moving in. The bedroom tax meant that families, when their children left home, couldn’t afford to stay in their two- and three-bedroom places. They had to downsize and move out of the estate. And, gradually, he realised that he had to go, too.

“I was one of only three people that hadn’t left, because I’d worked hard to stay,” he says. “And everyone else had worked hard to leave. And so then it was like, what are you staying for if everyone’s gone? What is your area? Is it the place? Or is it the people? I realised that it was the people. So for me, then there was nothing. But there’s something to that place for a kid that’s there now.”

Robinson is from East Ham. He grew up with his Jamaican parents and his brother at 69 Manor Road, as he says in T-Shirt Weather in the Manor; and then 86 St Olaves Road. It’s a small terrace house, with a garden out back, where he spent his teenage years. He remembers it well.

“With the garden, we took the fence away from the middle, between our house and our nextdoor neighbour, Teresa, and [her daughters] Claire and Sarah,” he says. “And now I’m older, I’ve realised that my mum and Teresa would help each other. So if one didn’t have any money, the other would do the shopping and then we’d share, and then sometimes it’d be vice versa. So they’d come in through the back, get their dinner… that’s how we worked. That’s how we grew up. And you’ll never see that again, you never have that same relationship with the neighbours and that.”

Robinson has long acknowledged how much where he grew up has shaped who he is. Not only in his lyrics, but in his YouTube series, Newham Talks, made during lockdown, where he interviewed other local artists – mostly grime stars – about their work. He always discusses their backgrounds, “because where I grew up means that much to me,” he says. “If I was in a different business, I don’t know if I’d have moved.”

But, in the end, like Kaluuya, he did move. And many of their friends did too: acting, music and football, the main exit strategies. Partly because those things seemed within reach, but also, “because they’re cool, innit!” says Kaluuya. “They’re the things that you wanna be.”

Kaluuya has been acting since he was 13. He was a troublesome kid at school, noisy and clever. Aged nine, he won a playwriting competition and his play was performed at the Hampstead theatre. (The teachers didn’t want him to win, because he was disruptive, but the judges insisted.) Aged 13, he joined Anna Scher theatre school after a plumber told his mum about it.

Scher, who started her open-to-all theatre school in 1968, and who only quit teaching in 2020, died last year. Kaluuya says he learned everything from Scher’s Saturday morning acting sessions. Mostly because he’s never had a tougher audience: “Everything was completely improvised, and if you were rubbish, they’d just laugh at you. And if you were boring, then they’re playing Snake [a phone game].”

What Kaluuya learned, he says, is that he wasn’t entitled to people’s attention, that he had to give something that was “worthy of someone leaning in, laughing along, listening”. He went to Anna Scher every weekend for three years and realised that “improv is a way of writing on your feet, creating a story in that moment”. He still uses some of the techniques he learned there.

He went to Camden Roundhouse, too, for acting classes, and recently, with others, he’s begun to set up a similar thing for local kids.

“£2 classes,” he explains, “because a lot of the cheap acting classes that I went to when I was a kid don’t exist any more. And everyone likes to complain and I just don’t like it. I’m like, What are we gonna do about it? So when they said, Do you wanna join the Roundhouse as associate artistic director I said: ‘Yes, and let’s do this.’”

Still, it’s Anna Scher that was really important to him, and another thing that stays with him from his days there is Scher’s idea of collectivism. She taught the kids that if their friend got a job, then they all got a job, that nobody in the room was competition, even if they were auditioning for the same part. Kaluuya still takes that into his acting: “When I come in the game, I come in happy,” he says. “Like, how are we going to make this work? Because if you’re whack, I’m whack. If I’m whack, you’re whack.”

Robinson nods. He was a talented footballer when he was young, playing for junior teams at Chelsea and Norwich City before he was 13, but, he says, “though football is obviously a team game, I really felt like I was more a part of a team with Deja Vu, the pirate radio station. A lot of what you’ve described is the same stuff I experienced through music and pirate radio.”

Deja Vu was based on the rooftops of Hackney Wick and brought through many grime and rap artists: Kano, obviously, but also Dizzee Rascal, Ghetts, Tinchy Stryder, Lethal Bizzle and others. Robinson started going there when he was around 15. “It was the place we all went to express ourselves. Like-minded people, collaboration, back to back, sharing a mic.” The budding rappers would hang out together, go to one another’s houses to write. “Just pushing each other. You’ve got your book, I’ve got my book, we’ve got a beat on, we just sit there and we just write. We could have done it separately, but for some reason, just coming together, not even talking, just coming together, being in the same place, being creative, that was it. We did it all ourselves.”

He hadn’t found that in football: “I was decent at it, but the same level of passion wasn’t there.” With music, he woke up thinking about it, and it taught him self-sufficiency: saving money to pay for an hour in a mixing studio, then playing the track out on Deja, and if it worked, maybe pressing a hundred records, taking them to shops, sale or return… When he talks about this time, he lights up. “Beautiful,” he says. “Small steps.”

“Music has informed how I approach acting,” he says. “I’m a writer, I’m not going to leave who I am creatively at the door, just because I’m in another medium. I’m going to approach it in the same way. So I need to understand the world, understand the lines, in order to be able to do it with my whole chest. I need to believe, in order to make you believe.”

And music, clearly, is wrapped around both of their lives. When I ask them how they keep in touch, Robinson says that Kaluuya just sends him invites to parties – “If I’m about, I’ll go!” Kaluuya rolls his eyes: “If he’s about…” – but they also share music. They tell me about Tobe Nwigwe, from Houston, Texas, whose music Kaluuya discovered on Instagram during lockdown. Kaluuya got in touch with him – of course he did – and now Nwigwe comes and sees him whenever he’s in London. “He’s a cool guy…”

Music and film and football, a bit, though Robinson doesn’t care about it much any more, and Kaluuya, a huge Arsenal fan, can’t watch matches, because he gets too wound up… And then the time is up, and they have things to do, and they laugh their way out of the room, which feels frou-frou and curly and quiet and boring, after they leave.

• The Kitchen is in select UK cinemas and on Netflix now