Meg Otanwa: A peep into the world of Benue-born wave-making Nollywood thespian

In I’ll Take My Chances (2011), her breakout movie where she starred alongside A-lister Ini Edo and Nigerian Adonis, Bryan Okwara, Idoma-born Meg Otanwa had impressed viewers with a star performance. And from her sophomore effort onward, it was evident she was no fluke.

Her career went on an upward trajectory as she featured back-to-back in career-defining flicks such as October 1 (2014) and Atlanta, and in the chart-bursting series Hush (2016/7) and the thriller, Derailed (2016). Her versatility, an almost inimitable ability to slip into a character and make it come alive in hard-to-forget roles had earned her a snug sobriquet: The Chameleon.

Meg’s stride wasn’t surprising to friends and acquaintances. Her background was a fitting tapestry for her career in acting. For one, she is a polyglot, fluent in six tongues, including three international languages.

Once asked by a journalist how she got the ear and tongue for languages, she had responded thus: “I’d say it runs in my family, as my father is a polyglot and each of my siblings speaks at least three different languages. Besides Idoma, my native tongue, I am fluent in five other languages— English, French, Hausa, Yoruba and Spanish.”

Her pedigree as a scholar is also astounding; having a BA English from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, MSc in Human Resources Management from TIME Universite Tunis, Tunisia and MBA from Universite Jean Moulin, Lyon, France, is no mean feat.

Career-wise, she had everything going for her as a banker at the African Development Bank (AfDB) in Tunis, the Tunisian capital. That was why her career switch baffled a lot of her fans and friends.

“I just got to a point in my life where I felt like it’s time to move to the next big thing” she said.

Walking out of banking and straight through the door into the strange world of acting is not a decision to be taken on impulse. “I have always wanted to act. I knew that at some point in my life, I would venture into it. It was not a question of if, it was a question of when,” she justified.

The return to Nigeria wasn’t entirely a smooth ride for Meg Otanwa. As a Benue Indigene, she inevitably shared in the scorched earth experience of her kin at the hands of marauding herdsmen wreaking havoc across the Benue basin in the past two years, burning farmlands, maiming and killing.  She’d also suffered a personal tragedy when her cousin,  Police officer Sunday Fabian Otanwa, was ambushed alongside his colleagues and murdered on duty in June 2017.

Forfeiting a well-paid job with the perks of international luxuries at AfDB for the fantasies of a tinseltown had drew lots of concerns and criticisms from many people who considered her decision faulty; today, however, the damsel who loves heels (“I don’t have flats,” she had disclosed in an interview) has proven her critics wrong.

Now the stage is hers, a veritable screen goddess.

By Ameh Comrade Godwin