You’ve Either Seen Tinuade Oyelowo on Girls or Dancing at Bembe

Tinuade Oyelowo spends her days slinging soy lattes at Café Grumpy in Greenpoint and her late Saturday nights sweating on the dance floor at Bembe in Williamsburg. At Grumpy, she does double duty; after four months there, she was tapped to play a barista on HBO’s Girls. (Turns out, Café Grumpy is where the lead character, and quintessential millennial in perpetual life-crisis mode, Hannah, works. Go figure.) Tinuade, the twenty-nine-year-old Bed-Stuy resident, appeared in two episodes last season and will appear in two more next season—“a very surreal New York experience,” she says.

Tinuade (who goes by Tinu) was born in Texas and raised in Florida (and named by her Nigerian father after he won a coin flip, she says). She doesn’t consider herself a “New York actor.” Though she received some theater training at Brooklyn College after moving here three years ago, she’s more of a performance artist. It was partly her passion for personal expression and partly her desire to experience “real Brooklyn” that made her fall in love with Bembe when she discovered the unmarked, unassuming club a year ago. Hours before the small and dark room transformed into a sweating, throbbing, body-on-body mashup of colors and culture (as Bembe tends to do), I sat down with Tinu while a hand-drummer banged along to the DJ, and Tinu talked about her burning desire for diversity and dancing.

I forgot who told me about this place. We decided to go in a taxi. We come here and it was the first moment that I said, “This is what Brooklyn is. This is my idea of a New York experience.”

This is what Brooklyn is. This is my idea of a New York experience.

We got dropped off on a very secluded corner. We saw the wooden doors. We went through. All of a sudden, it was like a burst of sun but at three o’clock in the morning. You just felt warmth. You felt body heat. You felt sweat and it wasn’t always your own sweat. People were dancing. Literally, the rhythm of the room was so intense that you couldn’t help but dance because you can’t stand still if everybody else around you is dancing.

What’s beautiful about here is that it’s diverse. I think one of the hardest things is when you go to a bar or a club and you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb.

I’ve had situations where people will grab my hair and want to touch me. I get a lot of people who ask, “Oh my god! I love your hair! Is that real?” And you’re like, “First of all, it’s none of your business whether my hair is real or not. Second, who the fuck are you?” I can’t say that. But you’ve made an assumption about the way that you think you’re used to seeing a black person.

It feels like a reflection when I walk through the door. Not specifically skin color, but diversity like: queer, straight, white, black, Puerto Rican, Asian, South Pacific, West Indies, African. You’re seeing so many different cultures here. Even though we live in Brooklyn, a lot of times we kind of put up shutters to culture. And we’re like, okay, I go from this point to this point and I don’t really ever interact with the cultures that are in and around my neighborhood. It’s wonderful when you can come into a place and everybody’s experiencing different types of fusions of music and expression that is so unbelievably raw.

The room was so intense that you couldn’t help but dance.

For Season 1, Girls came to Café Grumpy and asked them to do some scenes in their café. After Season 1, I was hired. My boss came up to me and was like, “Hey, they want to use you in an episode.” And I laughed. I was like, “Come on, really? Are you kidding me?” I hadn’t heard of Girls at the time.

Lena [Dunham] directed one of the scenes I was in. And then, the second time, for this season, she was in the scene I was in. It was amazing. She is an incredibly humble, sweet, down-to-earth person. Not that I was expecting otherwise. But you don’t know what to expect in these situations. You just go there and say, “I’m going to be myself and I hope that’s the best I can be.” Fortunately, it really has paid off for me: being honest and genuine. In the long run, being sincere and true to yourself is always going to pay off, in any way.

I told myself, “You don’t need to go and lose a thousand pounds overnight. They selected you when you were chunky, and you can’t go there looking anorexic.” Like with Bembe, you come and you’re true to yourself in the moment with the space and the music. Sometimes I’ve gone to amazing clubs and there are people dancing, but they’re also looking to see who’s dancing. I think it’s wonderful when you can come some place and just forget about that.

September 3, 2013

(Photos by Nicole Disser)