When it comes to national treasures, few are held in greater affection than Sir Lenworth George Henry. So we have to ask: what on Earth possessed the esteemed actor, writer, comedian, activist, academic and knight of the realm to sign up for a new reality show, in which he and a bunch of fellow celebs are dropped into the sea as bait for some hungry sharks?
“Well… I don’t really know,” admits the 66-year-old, laughing. “Recently, I suppose I’ve just felt like you shouldn’t be hindered by feelings of age. I feel like I’ve been wanting to do adventurous things for a lifetime, and I’ve never really allowed myself to do them. And this is absolutely the kind of thing I want to do. I already had my diving certificate, because I’d done it with my daughter years ago. But I had to retake that, and then there I was, out in the Bahamas, swimming with sharks. It was extraordinary.”
SHARK! Celebrity Infested Waters, which began on ITV last week, sees Henry and six other famous faces – including Amandaland’s Lucy Punch, Countdown’s Rachel Riley (who wrote her will before flying out) and Paralympian-turned-TV presenter Ade Adepitan – facing their fears by going eyeball to eyeball with different species of ocean predator, including Hammerhead, Bull and Tiger sharks.
Was it scary? “Yeah, of course it was scary!” says Henry. “It’s the first time I’ve ever put myself in the same vicinity as something with very big teeth, the size of a van. But it was also joyous and weird and exhilarating. And I was doing it with a really, really great team of people. By the end of the first week, we were a squad. We had each other’s backs.”
And – spoiler – they all survived? “Yeah, we survived. I was aware that ITV don’t want anybody of a celebrity nature to be eaten on television. So we were well looked after.” (Though one shark did have “a nibble” on comedian Ross Noble.)
The series coincides with the 50th anniversary of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – and the big takeaway message, says Henry, is that sharks aren’t our enemies. “Films like Jaws gave sharks a bad rep. But if they’re treated with respect, they’ll treat us with respect. And sharks are important to the ecosystem – if you took them out of the food chain, the coral reefs would die, for one thing. We need them.”
Henry’s partner of 13 years, casting director Lisa Makin, has previously said she thinks he takes on too much work. What did she make of his shark adventure? “Oh dear,” he says, with another booming laugh. “She was literally gobsmacked when she knew I’d accepted.”
By his own admission, Henry is a bit of a workaholic. When I interviewed him in 2019, he told me: “Work is easy, life is hard. The reason we cling to work, especially blokes, is there are rungs, there are hand-holds, whereas in life, you’re free-falling.” Has there been any progress on that front? “As I get older, I’m trying to do better,” he says. “Our kids [he has a daughter, Billie, from his 26-year marriage to Dawn French] and our friends need us to be present, and to engage. But I still work too hard, and I still take on too many things. But at least I’m aware of that now, whereas before I was spiralling. I’m not spiralling any more, thanks for asking.”
Talking to Weekend from his Berkshire home, Henry is in the middle of writing a script for his TV company, Esmerelda Productions, about “a man who finds it easy to relate to work, but not to his kid (“it’s a theme that keeps cropping up in my work”). It’s a task he’s juggling – irony alert – with learning the script for the West End premiere of Duncan Macmillan and Jonny Donahoe’s one-person play Every Brilliant Thing. Arriving in London after sell-out shows in 80 countries around the world, Henry will perform the play throughout August, alternating with co-creator Donahue, before Ambika Mod (One Day) and Sue Perkins take over for September.
“It’s a wonderful show about mental health, and how to survive it. It’s very funny, but also very sad. I hope people will come and enjoy it, and be moved by it, and learn some things from it. People need to know they’re not alone – that it’s okay to not be okay, and to seek help when they need it.”
Henry has sought help himself in the past, having struggled with depression after the loss of his mum, Winnie, in 1998. “I was in grief training for a long time, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that,” he says. “I sought help, and I’d do that again if I was in trouble.”
Winnie was a force of nature, who’d arrived in the West Midlands from Jamaica in search of a better life (and promptly nearly died of pneumonia in the British winter). With seven children to raise, she ruled the Henry household in Dudley with an iron fist – even, on one occasion, whacking young Lenworth about the head with a frying pan – but in later life, as a double amputee, she went out into the community doing Christian outreach work. He loved her “unreservedly”.
Having started as an apprentice welder in the same factory where his dad worked for 30 years, Henry’s fortunes changed when, aged 16, he appeared on the ITV talent show New Faces, doing impressions of Frank Spencer and David Bellamy while trussed up in a tuxedo and velvet bow tie. As a young comic – and a child of immigrants who’d told him to ‘h’integrate’ at all costs – he would often make jokes about his colour, as a way of getting audiences onside, and spent five long, miserable years working with the Black and White Minstrels, a song and dance troupe of white performers wearing blackface.
In the decades that followed, we all watched Lenny Henry grow up in public, developing his skills first as a character comedian on his hit BBC sketch show, then as an acclaimed film and theatre actor, and later writer. Significantly, his 2015 knighthood was awarded for services to drama – not comedy or entertainment – and charity, the latter in recognition of his role as a cofounder of Comic Relief.
One early straight role, playing an inspirational teacher in the 90s BBC drama Hope & Glory, also unlocked his passion for education, culminating in an English Literature degree from the Open University, followed in short order by an MA and a PhD.
“It does feel like I was expected to be the voice for everyone of colour in the country. I tried my best, but that can tear you into a million pieces”
It’s quite the journey, I suggest: from being ‘Trevor McDoughnut’ on Saturday morning kids’ TV show Tiswas to playing Othello, and working for the National Theatre. “Yeah, huge,” he says. “And I’m glad I’ve been allowed to have that journey. I was allowed to make mistakes in public, which is not an opportunity everyone gets. And I’m still learning. I’m just not doing it in public anymore.
“The first 15 years were a rollercoaster”, he adds, of a time when he and Dawn French were the first couple of British comedy, attracting the attention of both the tabloids and racist gangs who targeted their home. “After Othello [2009], there was a critical reappraisal of who I was, and what I was doing,” he reflects. “These days, I’m able to make better choices about the work I do, rather than running from one thing to the next, like a crazy person.”
He’s also become more outspoken: despite being ‘hideously unconfrontational’ by nature, he says he’s got better at ‘kicking the apple cart’. “As you get older, you get to be more confrontational, because you’ve learned stuff – you’ve been through some things. You grow a tougher skin. I’ve dealt with a lot of death in the last 10 years, and I feel like I’ve earned the right to have an opinion about things. I can stick up for myself better than I used to.”
He’s also found his voice speaking up against institutional racism in the arts, calling it ‘a stain against the entire industry’, and lending his name to the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity at Birmingham City University. “People expect you to have an opinion,” he says. “And I’m not of the opinion that all celebrities need to jump on a platform and start railing against everything, just to get attention. But if you care about something deeply, then stand up, say something. It’s important.”
For a long time, Lenny Henry was pretty much the only high-profile black entertainer on British television. Was it a burden, to carry such a large and diverse community on his shoulders? “It didn’t feel like that at the time, because I was young,” he says. “But on reflection, it does feel like I was expected to be the voice for everyone of colour in the country. And I tried my best, but that can tear you into a million pieces, and in the end I decided I had to be myself, and stand up for myself, and speak for myself, and play characters that were true to who I was, rather than trying to be everybody.”
As a writer, he has been making an effort to tell inclusive stories: his 2023 ITV drama Three Little Birds was based on his mother’s experience of arriving in Britain as part of the Windrush generation, while his first children’s novel,The Boy with Wings, was inspired by memories of growing up without any superheroes ‘who looked like me’. A stage adaptation of the book is currently playing at the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon, before transferring to the Birmingham Rep. “I’m really proud of it, I’m proud of the entire cast,” he says.
He hopes the production will bring a young, black audience into the theatre. “But I also hope that for the sharks,” he says. “Me and Ade Adepitan might well the first black guys you’ll see underwater. And to me that means something. That’s representation. Not that I want to encourage all black people to jump in the sea with sharks,” he laughs. “But I do think it’s inspirational to see us underwater, to see us in space, to see us being superheroes.”
In the first volume of his memoirs, published six years ago, Henry spoke candidly of the ‘coldness’ of his relationship with his ‘papa’, Winston – and his shocking discovery, aged 11, that the man he’d always known as ‘Uncle Bertie’ was actually his real father.
At the time, he likened writing his life story to ‘scouring your soul with emotional Brillo pads’. But it proved liberating. “My relationship with the press has certainly become easier,” he suggests. “For many years, I wouldn’t talk about my birth father, and I wouldn’t engage with questions about my dad at all – in my stand-up, my dad was just a kind of generic Jamaican dad. But in recent years, I’ve been able to talk more freely about it. And that’s been healing.”
As for that national treasure status… “I get a sense that people have connected with me, and still do, and I’m grateful for that,” he says. “I think carefully about who I am, and what my legacy might be. I’m pleased that I’ve been allowed to survive for this long.”
Despite his promise – to Lisa, and to himself – to be more careful with his work-life balance, he can’t see himself ever retiring. “My dad passed away very quickly after he retired, and I don’t want to do that. I think, in this business, you keep going until you stop. Tommy Cooper died on stage, and I’m not sure I necessarily want that – for the curtain to go down, with my feet turned up to the sky. But I don’t feel the need to stop. I’m always thinking about what I can do next, that might make people happy.”
Watch SHARK! Celebrity Infested Waters on ITVX
This interview was published in Waitrose Weekend on 24 July, 2025
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