32 Facts About Freema Agyeman

Freema Agyeman has appeared in films, including North v South, Eat Locals, and The Matrix Resurrections.

Freema Agyeman was born in Hackney, East London on 20 March 1979.

Freema Agyeman's mother, Azar Azizian-Kohan, born in 1948, is Iranian Kurdish, and her father, Osei Agyeman, is Ghanaian.

Freema Agyeman has an older sister, Leila, and a younger brother, Dominic.

Freema Agyeman attended Our Lady's Convent RC High School, a Catholic school in Stamford Hill.

Freema Agyeman took a theatrical course at Radford University in Virginia in 1998, even volunteering to work as a box-office assistant for student drama productions in which she was not cast.

When Freema Agyeman began her professional acting career, she chose to use a different spelling of her birth name, Frema, as her professional name, to avoid pronunciation problems.

Freema Agyeman had small guest roles in such TV series as BBC's long-running medical drama Casualty, Sky One's airline drama Mile High and ITV's police procedural The Bill, in which she appeared twice as two separate characters.

Freema Agyeman made her feature film debut in 2006, playing Nana in the independent drama Rulers and Dealers, written and directed by Stephen Lloyd Jackson.

Freema Agyeman auditioned for three roles in the 2006 series of Doctor Who.

Esme was ultimately cut from the final script, but Freema Agyeman was successful in her audition for Adeola.

Freema Agyeman filmed her role in the series in December 2005 and appeared on screen as Adeola on 1 July 2006.

Freema Agyeman studied dance and practised horse riding, martial arts and gymnastics, a fact that the producers exploited to provide her with more physically arduous action scenes.

Freema Agyeman attended another audition before a final screen test with Tenth Doctor actor David Tennant.

Freema Agyeman began filming for the third series in August 2006 and finished in March 2007.

Freema Agyeman made her screen debut as medical student Martha on 31 March 2007 in the episode "Smith and Jones".

Freema Agyeman continued to portray the character throughout every episode of the series.

Freema Agyeman voiced the character in the animated serial The Infinite Quest, which aired in twelve weekly segments during the run of the 2007 series.

In December, The Observer had an interview with Freema Agyeman and named her as one of their Faces of 2007.

Freema Agyeman later returned to the series along with several other former cast members to mark David Tennant's final appearance in "The End of Time".

Concurrent with her appearance on the show, Freema Agyeman read abridged audiobook adaptations of five of the Doctor Who New Series Adventures novels featuring Martha, namely The Last Dodo, Wetworld, The Pirate Loop, Martha in the Mirror and The Story of Martha.

Freema Agyeman had a starring role in the Torchwood radio play "Lost Souls", broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 10 September 2008 to promote the activation of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN research facility on that same day.

In July 2021, a new three-part audio series starring Freema Agyeman was announced, The Year of Martha Jones.

Freema Agyeman narrated the first series of BBC Three's hospital documentary series Bizarre ER, which ran from 14 February to 3 April 2008 and provided the narration for a second series which began airing on 21 April 2009.

Freema Agyeman played foundling girl Tattycoram in the Emmy Award-winning 2008 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, which began on 26 October 2008, starring alongside her fellow Torchwood co-stars Eve Myles and Ruth Jones.

Freema Agyeman was delighted to have appeared in Little Dorrit, as it had always been a dream of hers to appear in a period drama.

In 2008, Freema Agyeman appeared in Survivors, a BBC One remake of the cult 1970s TV series, as Jenny Walsh, although her character was killed off in the first episode in a shock twist despite featuring prominently in promotional materials for the series.

Freema Agyeman was nominated for Best UK Actress at the 2009 Birmingham Black International Film Festival's Music, Video and Screen Awards.

In 2015, Agyeman appeared in the Netflix series Sense8, created by J Michael Straczynski and Lilly and Lana Wachowski.

Freema Agyeman played series regular Amanita Caplan, the girlfriend of Nomi, a trans woman blogger and hacktivist.

In 2018, Freema Agyeman became a member of the main cast of the NBC medical drama series New Amsterdam, playing the role of Dr Helen Sharpe, the head of the oncology and hematology department.

Freema Agyeman has stated that doing good is her way of believing in God and expressing Catholic Christianity.