Veteran Nollywood actress Bukky Wright has revealed the painful reason she walked into the movie industry, saying it was never about fame. She wanted her children to be able to find her after they were taken away following the end of her marriage.
Speaking on TheCable’s 2Kobo podcast with Kolapo Olapoju, the 59-year-old said she did not even understand what stardom meant when she started acting. What drove her was a mother’s fear of disappearing from her children’s lives.
“I didn’t come into the industry thinking of becoming a star or anything because coming into the industry, I did not even know what star meant. I have not heard that word star but for me, it was more of when my children grow up, they would be able to find me,” she said.
Wright said the children were taken by their father when they were very young. In those years, she recalled, Nigerian custom often favoured the father after a marriage broke down. Even relatives, she said, told her to hand the children back.
“It’s a very emotional thing, and I just wanted a situation whereby I am not lost, or I am hard to find, because these children were taken away from me when they were very young. You know, in Nigeria, we believe the father owns the children, so when the marriage breaks, the father takes the children most of the time back then, but not now; things have really changed,” she said.
She tried to stay close anyway. She would sit at the junction near the house, wait for school runs, jump on a motorcycle and follow them. When the school kept changing, the chase became too hard on everyone.
“Because at some point when they first took them, I would go and sit by the junction of the house, when they are taking them to school, I would jump on a motorcycle and follow them to school. At some point, they would change schools, but I felt I did not want this for my children, so I said, let me allow them,” Wright said.
Letting go did not end the fear. She cried and asked herself how she would ever reconnect with them. Her answer was visibility.
“I would cry, and I thought, if I allow them, how would I find them, or how would they find me? That was the only thing that was coming to my brain and that if I became popular, I was not thinking of stardom, they would be able to ask one or two producers about their mother’s whereabouts. That was my own naive thinking.”
The confession reframes a career many fans only knew from the screen. For Wright, the roles were not a chase for celebrity. They were a long, public breadcrumb trail left for the children she once followed on a motorcycle.
Years later she stepped away from Nollywood again to raise her sons abroad, a decision she has said she would make over and over. She has since returned to screens, including work linked to the much-requested return of Omotara Johnson, telling audiences she is back to stay.