'I can still make a living': Why Covid-19 pandemic won't stop Kim Engelbrecht

The coronavirus pandemic was little more than a year old when Kim Engelbrecht auditioned for the second series of acclaimed British director-producer Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves.

The online audition took place in her hotel room, where she was effectively locked down while shooting Reyka, a local series now showing on DStv.

She got the part, and a day after shooting for Reyka wrapped, she began working on the sci-fi series, which has been shooting in Cape Town.

By then Engelbrecht, still probably best known to South Africans for her character Lolly in Isidingo, had been living in hotels for more than a year while shooting.

Despite that, she says she coped "fine".

"I'm pretty normal," she says on a Zoom call from Cape Town where shooting for Raised by Wolves is about to wrap and where nothing has been normal for 18 months.

Raised by Wolves is about two androids named Father and Mother who are given the task of adopting human children and raising them on the planet Kepler-22b, following the destruction of Earth.

Engelbrecht, 41, plays Decima, a ruthless scientist and weapons developer from Earth who is trying to balance some of her bad past by developing futuristic therapies.

The actress, who has also had roles on the US TV shows Dominion and The Flash, can't say much about the production due to nondisclosure agreements, except that shooting is taking place on "beautiful" sets.

"Nothing is familiar. It's all in your imagination, out of the mind of Ridley Scott."

She is yet to meet Scott - best known for his movies Blade Runner, American Gangster, Gladiator, and TV show The Good Wife. He directed the first two episodes of the first season of Raised by Wolves and is the show's executive producer. 

But Engelbrecht has been working with a growing cast of well-known directors on the series, including Sunu Gonera (Riding with Sugar) - "That was pretty cool," she says - and Ernest Dickerson, who is known for the biopic Juice about rapper Tupac Shakur.

However, she says the most famous person she has ever spent time with is Nelson Mandela, back in the day when she was one of his 46664 ambassadors.

"Each of us had a session where we sat down with him. It was an incredible gift, to have spoken to him and have him speaking to me."

Between shooting the new series, Engelbrecht is revelling in the idea that South African viewers are getting to know Reyka and the other characters.

"It's a wonderful piece of South African filmmaking. I want people to look at it and say, 'Wow, look what we're capable of, let's make more'."

Shooting Reyka in the middle of the pandemic meant living in hotels, but this helped cast and crew stick to a punishing schedule. For Engelbrecht, it meant finishing shooting at 4pm, getting something to eat, rehearsing for the next day and having an early night.

"You have to be asleep by 9pm for a 4am call so I can be ready for the 5am pick-up."

If there was any silver lining to the lockdowns, it was that the enforced isolation allowed plenty of self-reflection and time to explore her characters.

"I am an actor and you go through the spurts of isolation and quiet and inactivity," she says. "The nature of my job is to go inward, once you look for inspiration from the outside about who the characters are."

It also helped that she was able to continue working through the pandemic.

"I can still make a living and I can do what I love and I have enough time to work through a script, when before I was doing lots of other jobs at the same time."

Engelbrecht is unsure of her next move. She would like to return to Los Angeles but has no firm offers as yet.

"It's a bit up in the air," she says. "I'm looking at a couple of scripts. I'm not sure what travelling and life is going to be like."